Autologous Bone Marrow Transplantation - Blog Science Connections

246 Salvage Chemotherapy for Lymphoma
can be achieved when all these criteria are applied. When the survival of these
selected patients was examined, however, only 16% of that group were found to
be alive at 4 years (Fig 1 ). Most of these remissions were not durable, and as a
consequence, most of these patients have died of their disease.
When interpreting the results of bone marrow transplantation, it is
important to keep in mind that a modest fraction can be cured with standarddose
chemotherapy. The long-term results of high-dose chemotherapy
regimens with bone marrow transplantation for recurrent lymphoma have
similarly shown in most cases modest long-term survival rates in large cell
lymphoma. We now have to examine the potential of combining the best
standard-dose chemotherapy regimen followed immediately by high-dose
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0 40 80 120 160 200
Weeks
Figure 1. Results of MIME (mitoguazone, ifosfamide, methotrexate, and etoposide)
therapy in large cell lymphoma in relapse. Survival was related to being less than 60 years
of age, having no marrow disease, and achieving complete remission previously. Four of
25 (16%) were alive at 4 years.