About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Rituximab (Intravenous Route)
Drug Information provided by: MicromedexUS Brand Names
|
Description
Rituximab injection is a monoclonal antibody. It is used to treat a type of cancer called non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL). It can be used alone or with other cancer medicines (chemotherapy). It is also used as a "maintenance" treatment for patients with advanced follicular lymphoma who responded to initial treatment with this medicine plus chemotherapy (induction treatment).
Rituximab is also used in combination with fludarabine and cyclophosphamide (FC) for the treatment of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL).
Rituximab may also be used in combination with methotrexate to reduce the signs and symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis and help keep joint damage from getting worse after at least one other medicine (e.g., adalimumab, etanercept, infliximab) has been used and did not work well.
Rituximab is also used in combination with glucocorticoids to treat Wegener's granulomatosis (WG) and microscopic polyangiitis (MPA).
This medicine is to be administered only by or under the immediate supervision of your doctor.
Once a medicine has been approved for marketing for a certain use, experience may show that it is also useful for other medical problems. Although these uses are not included in product labeling, rituximab is used in certain patients with the following medical conditions:
- Immune or idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP) (a blood disease).
- Waldenstrom's macroglobulinemia (cancer of the blood).
Find Mayo Clinic on