Abstract
The retrospective study evaluated the secondary clinical risk score at relapse, the prognostic significance of pre-transplant positron emission tomography (PET), and complete remission (CR) assessed by computed tomography (CT) after salvage chemotherapy before autologous stem cell transplant (ASCT) in 76 patients with relapsed/refractory Hodgkin lymphoma (HL). Median follow-up after ASCT was 23 months.
Overall 11/20 PET-positive and 14/56 PET-negative patients relapsed after ASCT. In univariate analysis, only PET negativity before ASCT was significantly associated with better 2-year progression-free survival (PFS) and 2-year overall survival (OS).
Other factors were not significant. In multivariate analysis, none of the evaluated factors were significant for PFS and OS.
However, positive pre-transplant PET identified a population with worse PFS and OS at least in univariate analysis.