High-dose therapy and autologous stem cell rescue for poor risk and refractory lymphoma: a single centre experience of 123 patients

Over an 8-year period we autografted 123 patient with poor-risk lymphoma. Sixty-three patients had Hodgkin's disease (HD) and 60 non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL). Of the patients with HD, 45 had responsive and 18 resistant disease prior to high-dose therapy. Fifty-three patients with NHL had responsive and seven had resistant disease at the time of transplantation. Seventy-seven patients received autologous bone marrow (BM) rescue, 39 autologous peripheral blood progenitor cell (PBPC) rescue, and seven combined BM and PBPC rescue. High-dose chemotherapy was BEM in 67, BEAM in 39, TBI and cyclophosphamide or etoposide or BCNU in 10, etoposide/mitozantrone in six and etoposide/melphalan in one. There was eight (6.5%) deaths due to treatment-related toxicity, within the first 100 days post-transplantation. Of the patients with HD 41 (65%) are alive at a median follow-up of 39 months (range 2-94). Thirty-three (52%) patients remain in CR. The median DFS of the 63 patients with HD is 34 months (95% CI 7-61). The median DFS for patients transplanted with responsive disease was significantly better than for those transplanted with refractory disease (61 vs 21 months P < 0001). Thirty-five (58%) of the patients with NHL are alive, and 20 (33%) remain in CR. The median DFS for patients transplanted with responsive and refractory disease was 11 months (95% CI 3-19) and 4 months (95% CI 0-9; P = NS) respectively. The median DFS for patients transplanted with HD was significantly better than for patients transplanted with NHL (34 vs 8 months, P < 0.002). In both groups there was no significant difference in DFS in patients receiving one, two, three or more lines of therapy prior to transplantation. In summary, in patients with poor-risk lymphoma who have responsive disease high-dose therapy may result in durable CRs. Conversely, only a small proportion of patients with HD or NHL with resistant disease achieve CR after autologous stem cell rescue.