There are a variety of organizations out there that help disseminate education material. I have recently had the option to work with a group called "Clinical Care Options." I gave a seminar for them at ASH on Diffuse Large B Cell Lymphoma and more recently they asked me to put together a module for patients with high risk CLL (link here).
"High Risk CLL" isn't a really tightly defined term although there does seem to be some consensus that it may define a group of patients at high risk of dying from their disease within a few years. It can refer to patients with high risk genetic markers such as 17P deletion or mutations like BIRC3. It can refer to patients who fail to achieve a really good response to therapy and have high levels of "minimal residual disease." It can also refer to patients who relapse quickly after initial therapy. Though there is probably quite a bit of overlap between these sorts of patients (ie. the patients with bad markers, fail to respond well and relapse early) those relationships are only still just becoming more clear (see my post on CLL prognosis).
Anyhow, I wanted to provide you with a link to the education module. You need to sign up for a free account which takes about 10 seconds to do. I hope it is a good tutorial for physicians who take care of patients with CLL. I acknowledge that it is fairly technical for patients who are new to CLL but each of the concepts have been presented previously on my blog.
Thanks for reading
