Dear Jeanie, Good question. And the doctors are studying patients who were newly diagnosed and took Gleevec right from the start in a trial called the IRIS trial. There is now a 6-year follow-up of these patients. And the longer a patient remains in remission on Gleevec, the less chance of a relapse. The relapse rate on Gleevec is falling with time
I have cut and pasted a portion from Dr. Druker's article in the New England Journal of Medicine published in 2006 on the 5-year Gleevec data. For patients in CCR, like yourself, the risk of relapse in the fourth year is only 0.4% compared to the first year at 5%. So, relapse rates fall with time. In 2007, another article came out on the 6 year results and that said a few patients did relapse from CCR but again regained their CCR. So, as long as you are CCR (testing negative for Ph chromosome in the bone marrow cytogenetics test or FISH test), your risk of relapse on Gleevec gets less with time. Here is a portion of the article, anyone needing the full article, mail me, privately. Love, Anjana Long-term Outcomes At 60 months, the estimated rate of event-free survival was 83% (95% confidence interval [CI], 79 to 87), and an estimated 93% of patients (95% CI, 90 to 96) had not progressed to the accelerated phase or blast crisis (Fig. 2). Of the 553 patients receiving imatinib, 35 (6%) progressed to the accelerated phase or blast crisis, 14 (3%) had a hematologic relapse, 28 (5%) had a loss of major cytogenetic response, and 9 (2%) died from a cause unrelated to CML. The estimated annual rate of treatment failure after the start of imatinib therapy was 3.3% in the first year, 7.5% in the second year, 4.8% in the third year, 1.5% in the fourth year, and 0.9% in the fifth year. The corresponding annual rates of progression to the accelerated phase or blast crisis were 1.5%, 2.8%, 1.6%, 0.9%, and 0.6%, respectively. In the 454 patients who had a complete cytogenetic response, the annual rates of treatment failure were 5.5% in the first year, 2.3% in the second year, 1.1% in the third year, and 0.4% in the fourth year after a response was achieved. The corresponding annual rates of progression to the accelerated phase or blast crisis were 2.1%, 0.8%, 0.3%, and 0%, respectively, in these patients. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ [CMLHope] A support group of http://cmlhope.com ------------------------------------------------- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CMLHope" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/CMLHope -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
