• Haematology is concerned with all aspects of blood formation and the diseases which occur when the process breaks down.
• Blood is composed of cells, proteins, and fluids that are made in the lymphatic organs and bone marrow.
• With a range of leading-edge haematology services, including bone marrow and stem cell transplantation the hospital is well-equipped to deal with any blood related problems.

Haematological Malignancies:

• The haematological malignancies are a complex group of cancers derived from bone marrow cells arising as a result of disruption of the normal cellular processes in the bone marrow and immune system that are distinctive and show many differences from solid tumours.
• Haematological malignancies include myeloma, lymphoma and leukaemia and account for over 10% of cancers.

Diagnosis and management:

• Their accurate diagnosis and management is central to the major improvements in survival and quality of life that has occurred over the last 10-15 years.
• The diagnosis and management of patients has been transformed as new technologies replace traditional approaches to diagnosis and accelerate the introduction of novel treatments that increasingly define not just the diseases themselves, but how an individual patient should best be treated based on sound and comprehensive diagnostic information.
• Patients often present with non-specific symptoms of tiredness and lethargy, recurrent infections and bleeding due to anemia, low white blood cell count and low platelets.
• A detailed clinical examination, pathological investigations and where appropriate, radiological imaging allows an accurate diagnosis to be made and a targeted, individualized approach to patient treatment that maximises the effect on the disease whilst minimizing the risk of side-effects to the patient
• Diagnosis It is extremely important to accurately establish early on the exact diagnosis and to attempt to identify factors that might predict how well or otherwise patients may respond to treatment.
• Increasingly, the appropriate investigation of patients at the time of diagnosis is allowing physicians to select treatments that are more or less likely to produce the best outcomes for patients. In addition to blood tests and bone marrow tests, specialized radiological investigations are accurately identifying the extent of disease and are being used to identify minimal disease at follow-up that may predict for outcomes. 

Treatment

• New treatments are continually being developed in this rapidly evolving field and the introduction of novel agents has dramatically improved the outcomes for hematological malignancies by both improving survival and reducing toxicity.
• Our Specialists are active clinical researchers, both devising and participating in local, national and international patient orientated clinical trials allowing patients the opportunity to access state of the art treatments at the earliest stage of their development.

The main types of treatment are:

Drugs (that directly kill cancer cells) or Chemotherapy.

• This may be given as a single agent but more commonly they are used as combinations of different chemotherapies to avoid the development of drug resistance. Steroids are frequently used as part of treatment, to help destroy cancer cells and make chemotherapy more effective.

Bone marrow or stem cell transplantation.

• The aim of these types of treatment is to allow you to have much higher doses of chemotherapy than usual to eradicate disease and to subsequently replace your own blood forming cells from a source of healthy blood cells.

Radiotherapy

• uses high energy x-rays and similar beams to treat and eradicate disease and is extremely effective in a wide variety of haematological malignancies.

Biological therapy

• works by helping your immune system to recognize and attack tumour cells by either stimulating the patient’s own immune system or administering antibodies or immune cells collected and processed from an external source