Impact of Individual Comorbidities on Treatment Outcomes in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia

Introduction: Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is a common leukemia which tends to occur late in life. Comorbidities are common, and the iwCLL guidelines recommend their assessment in patients (pts) enrolled on clinical trials. The Cumulative Illness Rating Scale (CIRS) is a rigorous tool designed to evaluate the burden of comorbidities, which has been employed in therapeutic studies. Our group and others demonstrated that CIRS score predicts survival in pts with CLL treated with either chemo-immunotherapy (CIT) or novel kinase inhibitors (KI; ibrutinib) (Manda et al, 2016 & Gordon et al, 2018). However, CIRS has not become part of common clinical practice, in part due to complexities in scoring. It is also unknown whether all of the 14 organ systems included in the score carry equal weight to determine prognosis. Here we report the impact of specific comorbidities from a multicenter retrospective cohort of CLL pts treated with either CIT or KI.