Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have been awarded a $6.38 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to determine the long-term burden of morbidity borne by blood cancer patients treated with or without blood or marrow transplantation, or BMT.  

In 2018, an estimated 175,000 individuals were diagnosed with a hematologic malignancy — or blood cancer, such as leukemia, myeloma or lymphoma — in the United States. Such cancers are typically managed through high-intensity chemotherapy with or without radiation. Patients with progressive disease or high risk of relapse are treated with even higher-intensity chemotherapy/radiation and BMT.

“Survival rates after BMT are improving at the rate of 10 percent per decade — steady improvements in outcome have resulted in a growing number of BMT survivors, a population uniquely vulnerable to long-term life-threatening chronic morbidity,” said Smita Bhatia, M.D., Pediatric Hematology/Oncology, principal investigator of the study, director of the Institute for Cancer Outcomes and Survivorship, and senior scientist in the O’Neal Comprehensive Cancer Center. “A better understanding of post-BMT health care needs could result in the deployment of targeted strategies that yield better quality of survival and reduced utilization of health care resources.”

The study will construct a cohort of more than 10,000 patients treated with BMT between 1974 and 2014 at three transplant sites — UAB, University of Minnesota and City of Hope — as well as a cohort of 3,000 patients treated with conventional therapy without BMT, which will amount to the largest cohort ever studied.

Read full story at UAB News