Importance of Patient Counseling in Chronic Myeloid Leukemia Treatment

Jorge Eduardo Cortes, MD, Deputy Chair and Professor of Medicine in the Department of Leukemia at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, discusses his recommendations for pharmacists who may be counseling a patient with chronic myeloid leukemia during the American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting in Chicago, IL.

Transcript

I think it is important to counsel the patients of the importance of every drug, every dose that they take of the drug. There have been studies that have shown that patients that miss 10% or more of their doses per month have a very low probability of getting to those deep molecular responses. Now if you think about, missing 10% of your doses in a month, if it’s 30 days in a month that means missing 3 days of therapy. It doesn’t sound like much, but it is important. So I think that communicating these messages of the importance of adhering to therapy, taking it as prescribed, minimizing interruptions And of course, help them to understand what other potential side effects that they can experience and encourage them to communicate with the doctors so that if something is bothering them, that they seek help instead of just stopping therapy and see if it goes away to see if there’s other ways to manage that so we minimize interruptions that could, in the long term, affect their ability to stop therapy.