Characteristics and Outcome of Elderly Patients (>55 Years) with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

Prognosis of elderly ALL patients remains dismal. Here, we retrospectively analyzed the course of 93 patients >55 years with B-precursor (n = 88) or T-ALL (n = 5), who received age-adapted, pediatric-inspired chemotherapy regimens at our center between May 2003 and October 2020. The median age at diagnosis was 65.7 years, and surviving patients had a median follow-up of 3.7 years. CR after induction therapy was documented in 76.5%, while the rate of treatment-related death within 100 days was 6.4%. The OS of the entire cohort at 1 and 3 year(s) was 75.2% (95% CI: 66.4-84.0%) and 47.3% (95% CI: 36.8-57.7%), respectively, while the EFS at 1 and 3 years(s) was 59.0% (95% CI: 48.9-69.0%) and 32.9% (95% CI: 23.0-42.8%), respectively. At 3 years, the cumulative incidence (CI) of relapse was 48.3% (95% CI: 38.9-59.9%), and the CI rate of death in CR was 17.3% (95% CI: 10.9-27.5%). Older age and an ECOG > 2 represented risk factors for inferior OS, while BCR::ABL1 status, immunophenotype, and intensity of chemotherapy did not significantly affect OS. We conclude that intensive treatment is feasible in selected elderly ALL patients, but high rates of relapse and death in CR underline the need for novel therapeutic strategies.ISSN:2072-669

Modulating Tone in the Early English Slaughter of the Innocents Plays : Between Grief, Vengeance, and Humour

This article was written with the generous support of the Swiss National Science Foundation, who funded an eighteen-month research sabbatical at the University of Edinburgh. It offers a different strategy as to how a critic might approach the question of humour in the early English Slaughter of the Innocents plays. Without trying to delimit the moments in which humour is identifiable, I suggest that paying attention to the use of emotion in the plays, and how it relates to rapid changes in action and tone, goes some way to thinking about how humour might work within the dramatic shape of the six surviving episodes. The complexity of the emotional responses that I argue are demanded from an audience works with rather than against the sacred content, even when such responses include laughter, and requires paradigms of investigation that move beyond Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque