Current status in management of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) in Republic of Macedonia

Abstract

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is the most commonly diagnosed type of leukemia in Western Europe and North America, and represents about 30% of all leukemias in adults. CLL is a disease of elderly, who often have multiple comorbidities. These factors affect further treatment decisions, despite the great progress in the therapy of CLL in the last two decades. The aim of this study was to evaluate the current status in the management of patients with CLL in the Republic of Macedonia and to compare it with CLL patients in other western countries. We analyzed 102 patients with CLL referred to our Institution for control and/or treatment in the period from January 2015 to October 2015. Median age of our group of patients at the time of diagnosis was 62.7 years with almost 40% of patients older than 64 years. Male to female ratio was 1.3:1 and 54% of patients were diagnosed in stage "0" according to Rai staging system. Watch and wait was the most common treatment approach (58.8%) at the time of diagnosis, but at the moment of analysis only 33% of patients were still without treatment. The most common treatment in this group of CLL patients was FCR protocol with 39.5% of patients treated with an average of 5 cycles of this immunochemotherapeutic regimen. The average time of progression free survival (PFS) in all treated patients was 32.8 months with range between 2-72 months. In summary, clinical characteristics of CLL patient in our clinical settings and the most common therapeutic approach at our Institution do not differ significantly from the characteristics of the average CLL patient in other studies.