Treatment of relapse and refractory Hodgkin lymphoma

Abstract

Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) represents one of the great success stories in hematology going from a uniformly fatal disease, to one that is curable in the vast majority of cases. Despite this success, approximately 5-10 % HL patients are refractory to initial treatment and 10-30 % of patients will relapse after achieving an initial complete remission. The standard treatment is second-line therapy followed by autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (autoHSCT), which cures an additional 50 % of patients. Brentuximab Vedotin, "antibody-drug conjugate", dramatically changed the possibilities of therapy for relapses/refractory HL. The article presents a review of the literature on the treatment of relapses/refractory HL.