Cytoreductive Therapeutic Approach in the Essential Thrombocythemia (ET) Patients of the Registro Italiano Trombocitemia (RIT): Preliminary Data

Background: the Registro Italiano Trombocitemia, that is a GIMEMA project, has been activated to registry Italian Essential Thrombocythemia (ET) patients, to improve the diagnosis appropriateness (WHO criteria), to verify the prognostic value of the clinical and biological parameters, to evaluate the compliance to the therapeutical Italian guidelines (1), and to create a network for activation of new studies. Objective: this analysis is mainly devoted to describe the ET patients registered in the RIT and to evaluate the therapeutic approach adopted in the 102 participating hematological centers. Material and methods: two thousand and fifteen ET patients have been registered after the written informed consent was obtained, and data validation by various expert panels is in progress. This preliminary report considers 1785 patients, diagnosed mainly (1078, 60.4%) since the publication in the year 2004 of the ET therapy Italian guidelines (1). Results: the patients, 678 (38%) males and 1107 (62%) females, showed at diagnosis: age 60.3 ± 16.8 years with higher values in males than in females (61.7 ± 15.3 vs. 59.4 ± 17.7, p Conclusion: in the analyzed patients of the ET Italian registry the diagnosis appropriateness resulted improved in the cases observed since the year 2004 respect those observed before, with an increase of bone marrow biopsies from 51% to 68% of patients. Moreover, in accord with the ET therapy Italian guidelines, the use of the cytoreductive drugs was less frequent in the patients diagnosed since the year 2004 than before (particularly for BUS, IFN, and ANA) and the more safe molecules IFN and ANA were preferentially deserved to the younger patients.