Despite her 84 years, Jane Fonda has also chosen social media to announce to everyone that she has a tumor. And she did it with the tones that are suitable for a platform like Instagram despite the seriousness of the news: with lightness and optimism. What she is battling the actress against is non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma which she called “a very treatable cancer with which 80% of people survive. For this – Fonda writes on social media – I feel very lucky “. What is this cancer of the lymphatic system? What are the symptoms to watch out for and how is it treated today to the point of having such high survival rates? We asked the professor Armando Santorodirector of the Humanitas Cancer Center at the Humanitas Irccs Clinical Institute in Rozzano.
What is non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma?
This term actually refers to a series of diseases of the lymphatic tissue that are mainly localized on the lymph glands, but which can affect all organs and also the bone marrow. In non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, some lymphocytes begin to multiply abnormally and unregulated, collecting in the lymph nodes (glands of the lymphatic system). Since the lymphocytes thus produced do not have the characteristics necessary to fight infections, the person with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is more vulnerable and becomes ill more easily.
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Are there any risk factors that contribute to its onset?
Unfortunately, there are no precise causes that allow the risk factors to be identified. Its onset is rather random. Currently in Italy there are 13 thousand new cases every year and even if it can occur at any age, the group most at risk is that over 65 years. Men have a slightly higher risk of developing it than women.
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What are the symptoms to watch out for in order to arrive at an early diagnosis?
Unfortunately, this tumor is not symptomatic. The most common complaint caused by NHL is swelling, usually painless, of a lymph node in the neck, armpit, or groin. When we realize it, it would be advisable to contact the doctor to evaluate the advisability of a histological examination.
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How is the diagnosis made?
The only way to confirm the presence of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is to perform a biopsy, which is to take a piece of the lymph node and examine it in the laboratory.
Jane Fonda said she felt lucky that her lymphoma is “very treatable”: are they all that easily treatable?
This statement suggests that it is a low-malignancy non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but in reality that of lymphomas is a heterogeneous family of tumors ranging from those with low or high aggressiveness that have a slower evolution to very aggressive ones. These are really three different pathologies with a changing path of treatment and survival prospects.
How can non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas be treated today?
The good news is that today, thanks to precision medicine, many patients are treated in a completely different way compared to 5-10 years ago with specific drugs capable of obtaining in many conditions a marked improvement in therapeutic results and in the duration of the response. Today 60-70% of patients recover completely.
What are the treatments depending on the severity of the lymphoma?
In patients suffering from low-malignancy non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, mild therapies are used, which generally allow a long life expectancy of over 10-15 years. The attitude is different for aggressive lymphomas for which intensive chemo and immunotherapy treatments are used with a cure rate of over 60-70%.
In addition to chemotherapy and immunotherapy, how can one intervene?
For both types of lymphomas, in addition to classic salvage therapies, such as autologous and allogeneic bone marrow transplantation, new treatments of great interest such as Car-T have exploded in recent years. This is a new treatment methodology that involves the removal of the patient’s T lymphocytes, the main architects of the immune response against the tumor, to rearrange them in the laboratory in such a way as to make them capable of selectively recognizing and destroying cancer cells. With the Car-T in patients who have had a relapse we obtain excellent chances of definitive recovery. Also for both types of lymphoma, new therapies are being developed with completely different approaches: these are bispecific antibodies and immunoconjugate antibodies that are in the very advanced phase of experimentation. In short, based on the data we have, the overall vision is that these are diseases that can be cured definitively in a high percentage of cases or in which we can hope to have a life expectancy of over 10-15 years.