Treatment of advanced-stage hodgkin lymphoma

Abstract

Before the introduction of combination chemotherapy, more than 95 % of patients with advanced HL succumbed to their disease within 5 years. Thus, remission rates in excess of 50 % achieved with MOPP (mechlorethamine, vincristine, procarbazine, and prednisone) were a major breakthrough in oncology. MOPP was successfully introduced almost 40 years ago and used for many years for advanced-stage disease, resulting in long-term remission of nearly 50 %. It was then replaced by ABVD (doxorubicin, bleomycin, vinblastine, and dacarbazine), after a series of large multicenter trials had compared ABVD with alternating MOPP/ABVD or MOPP alone.