The end of lymphoma treatment does not mean you can rest easy

After three months of chemotherapy, Lao Wang's lymphoma finally achieved complete remission, and the doctor told him that his lymphoma treatment could be completed. Lao Wang recalled the three months of chemotherapy, and he could not help but sigh that he could finally rest easy after the treatment was over. However, the doctor warned Lao Wang because of his sigh that the end of chemotherapy does not mean that the tumor cells have been completely eradicated.

For lymphoma patients who achieve complete remission after chemotherapy or combined radiotherapy, it is only a preliminary treatment success in the clinical sense, not the complete eradication of tumor cells. In fact, there are still hundreds of thousands or millions of tumor cells remaining in the patient's body, but it is difficult to detect with ordinary CT, B-ultrasound, or even PET/CT and hematological tests. Take Hodgkin's lymphoma and diffuse large B-cell lymphoma as examples. Although the efficiency of the initial treatment is very high and the complete remission rate is also high, about 1/4 to 1/3 of patients will relapse clinically, and the recurrence rate of peripheral T-cell lymphoma is even higher.

Therefore, even after the treatment of lymphoma is over, you should not take it lightly and need to have regular checkups. Usually, the first two years after the end of treatment are the peak period for lymphoma recurrence, so the frequency of checkups should be higher, preferably once every 3 to 4 months. After two years, it can be changed to once every six months, and after five years, it can be changed to once a year, and this should be maintained for life. Even so, you should not relax your vigilance, because although the five-year non-recurrence of lymphoma patients is used as the criterion for judging the cure of the tumor, some types of lymphoma, such as Hodgkin's lymphoma, may still recur 20 years after the end of treatment, and indolent lymphomas may recur at any time because they cannot be cured.