Patrick Connor Johnson, MD

Patrick Connor Johnson, MD, an instructor in Medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, discusses what physicians take into consideration when integrating third-line treatment options in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL).

According to Johnson, a number of new treatment options for DLBCL have been created in recent years, especially in the third-line setting. However, background is still needed as there is still a lack of understanding in regards to what factors that go into physician decision making when picking a third-line treatment.

He and other investigators came up with a survey for physicians who treat patients with DLBCL across Western Europe and the United States in order to obtain more information. The survey concluded that physicians look at the data on survival and toxicities the most in order to choose a third-line treatment and logistical factors, such as frequency of administration and whether hospitalization was required, were taken into consideration the least.

 I think it's a great question. I think what this can be helpful for is this provides a broad swath of what a number of different physicians across countries are doing. And so, I think that lends support to the idea that this is a fairly broad country comparison of these attributes. And it really gives a perspective for physicians about what are the top attributes across a number of different physicians, across a number of different countries.

 Obviously, for a given patient, you have to integrate all kinds of things to make this decision making. But I think this provides a little bit of data to help inform physicians across the board about what different physicians around a number of different countries weigh in terms of their own decision making. I will note that there's always a limitation that there's a chance that these decisions could not be representative of all physicians across all these countries. It's a limited sample size per country. But this still does survey physicians across a number of different countries and provides an overview of what the most common treatment attributes in terms of decision making are.

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Patrick Connor Johnson, MD, discusses what physicians take into consideration when integrating third-line treatment options in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma 

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Integrating Physician Opinions Into DLBCL Treatment Selection