Submitted December 18, 2007
Accepted February 19, 2008
Trends in long-term survival of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia from the 1980s to the early 21st century
Hermann Brenner*, Adam Gondos, and Dianne Pulte
Division of Clinical Epidemiology and Aging Research, German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany
Weill Cornell Medical Center, New York, NY, United States
* Corresponding author; email: h.brenner{at}dkfz-heidelberg.de.
Although chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) has remained incurable with standard treatments, newer therapeutic approaches, such as chemoimmunotherapy or stem cell transplantation bear the potential for prolonged survival. We estimated trends in age specific 5- and 10-year absolute relative survival of CLL patients in the United States from 1980-1984 to 2000-2004 from the 1973-2004 data base of the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program. Period analysis was employed to disclose recent developments with minimum delay. Overall, 5-and 10-year absolute survival from diagnosis increased from 54.2% to 60.2% (+6.0 percent units, p<0.0001), and from 27.8% to 34.8% (+7.0 percent units, p<0.0001), respectively. Despite a strong age gradient in prognosis, increases in 5-year absolute and relative survival over time were rather homogeneous across age groups. By contrast, increases in 10-year absolute and relative survival close to or well above 10 percent units were observed for all patients below 80 years of age at diagnosis, compared to no increase at all for older patients. Long-term survival expectations of patients with CLL have substantially improved over the past two decades except for patients aged 80 or older at the time of diagnosis. Future studies are needed to confirm and expand our findings.
