[Primary treatment of advanced Hodgkin's disease].

Primary treatment of advanced Hodgkin's disease. Hodgkin's disease is one of the few malignant diseases that can be cured even in an advanced stage in the majority of cases. By employing a polychemotherapy containing anthracyclines, a long remission and recovery can be achieved in 60-70% of the patients. At present the standard treatment is ABVD (adriamycin, bleomycin, vinblastine, dacarbazine) scheme for the following reasons: besides good treatment results early side effects are more favourable; sterility and secondary acute leukemia present themselves less often than by employing regimens containing alkylating agents. Unfortunately, some of the patients do not react properly to the treatment and about one third of the patients who are in remission following primary treatment will relapse at a later stage. The main goal is now to further improve treatment (recovery) results without an increase, or even a decrease of early or late side effects. Awareness of prognostic factors should lead to the employment of a less intensive but not toxic therapy in patients with good prognosis to prevent overtreatment, while in cases with bad prognosis a more effective regimen is needed (even for the price of expected complications). The latest meta-analysis on the subject has shown that--similarly to sequential high dose therapy--the addition of radiotherapy to an effective chemotherapy does not seem to prolong the survival of patients. Despite the excellent therapeutic results achieved by the many new "intensive" chemotherapies, there is unfortunately no optimal therapy or protocol available today. The multicentre analysis to confirm these results and to compare them with standard scheme is still under way. It is to be hoped that risk adapted management for advanced stage Hodgkin's disease will also be available soon.