ATG & Cyclosporine: Complete vs Partial Response
 

I went to the AA/MDS Conference in Cleveland last Saturday and I got to ask Dr. Maciejewski of the Cleveland Clinic: "What percent of patients obtain a complete response in six months?" His answer..... 10%.

Yeah, I know. That was a surprise.

I give credit to LisaV who asked this question in another post, she was looking for statistics.

Thanks for asking him that, Edith.

To be fair, the way you framed the question may have given rise to a lower figure than you were expecting. I'm actually not too surprised. I haven't heard of many people that have regained full normal counts within that short a time period. Most will begin to show a response within that time frame, but getting all 3 lines back within normal range generally takes a lot longer (if ever).

The question on my mind was more of what percent of ATG recipients eventually do acheive full durable remission. Implied in that, of course, is no relapse, so I suppose it's kind of a two-parter. You'd probably get different answers to that one too, depending on what kind of time frame you used-- at ten years, at twenty, etc. "For life" is much too vague, and has a lot of built-in problems in interpretation (i.e. how long did that person live, why did they die, and how useful are old statistics when medical knowledge and practice keep improving?)

Every bit of information helps to piece together a more accurate picture, though.

I guess I'm with the 90%...

That doesn't give one a warm fuzzy. But thanks for sharing, I think it is important to know these things.

Deb

To quote Dr. Scheinberg
 

It looks like about 50% of responders will not have to deal with the disease again. They may have to take small doses of cyclosporine or whatever...but nothing major. (This is some 20 years out now)

The rest may have a treatable relapse or clonal evolution.

Thanks, Ryan!