Background: The aim of this study is the 2-[fluorine-18]fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose (FDG)-positron emission tomography (PET) evaluation following radioimmunotherapy (RIT) with ibritumomab tiuxetan Y 90 in patients with non-Hodgkin's follicular lymphoma (FL).
Materials and methods: We retrospectively analyzed data from 59 relapsed or refractory FL patients treated with ibritumomab tiuxetan Y 90 in four different PET centers who had a PET scan carried out before and after RIT. Possible predictive factors of progression-free survival (PFS) were studied through univariate and multivariate analysis.
Results: The post-RIT PET documented 45.8% complete responders (CR), 25.4% partial responders (PR) and 28.8% nonresponders [stable disease + progressive disease], with an overall survival of 71.2% (range 59.5%-90.9%). With a median follow-up period of 23 months, the univariate analysis documented a statistically significant relation between disease extent before RIT and response to treatment with respect to PFS (P = 0.015), while all the other prognostic factors showed no significant correlation. When carrying out the multivariate analysis, post-RIT PET resulted as the lonely independent predictor of PFS (P < 0.00001).
Conclusions: RIT is an effective therapy in FL patients, as confirmed in our study too. Disease extension before treatment and response to RIT, as assessed by FDG-PET, result as main predictors of PFS, with the post-RIT PET result being the only independent predictive factor.