What Do Disparities in Multiple Myeloma Look Like?
What Do Disparities in Multiple Myeloma Look Like? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
How do health disparities in minority populations with multiple myeloma play out? Expert Dr. Sikander Ailawadhi from the Mayo Clinic joined to discuss data about African Americans and Hispanic Americans with myeloma. Watch as he shares the average age of disease onset, how their symptoms vary, transplant rates, new treatment rates and more.
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Transcript:
Rebecca Law:
Dr. Ailawadhi, for our audience who might not understand what health disparities in myeloma look like, can you give a high-level definition and overview, please?
Dr. Sikander Ailawadhi:
So, there are disparities at a lot of different levels, just taking the case of multiple myeloma, specifically. So, for example, patients from different racial and ethnic backgrounds tend to present in a different way. So, African Americans present with the diagnosis at a much younger age. The presence of the myeloma precursor called MGUS, or monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance, is seen much more frequently in African Americans. Even I would say include Hispanics into that, because Hispanics also get diagnosed at a much younger age. The disease presents very differently, for example, African Americans will present much more frequently with anemia or kidney dysfunction, but they will present with much lesser bone fractures in multiple myeloma.
So, those are disparities in how the disease presents or how it becomes kind of evident. Now, when we talk about disparities, one of the very stark shades of disparities in myeloma is how treatment is given or made available to patients, especially when we talk about racial minorities. So, there has been a lot of literature looking at this, and it has been seen that patients who belong to racial and ethnic minorities, they do not get access to the same kind of treatment in the same timely fashion. So, for example, African Americans and Hispanics are much lesser likely to get a transplant when it comes to myeloma treatment. Now again, I don’t want to say that improvements have not happened. The rates of transplant, rates of new drug use, have increased across the board for all races and ethnicities, but when we compare, the rate of that increase has been much slower in African Americans.
In fact, one of the studies that we looked at, some national data, it took Hispanics a little more than 100 days from the time of diagnosis to get to initial treatment with bortezomib (Velcade), which is a cornerstone drug and is used almost across the board for initial therapy. So, the treatment, there are disparities. And similar, there are some outcome disparities. While on the face of analysis, it’s been said several times that races or different racial sub-groups will have similar outcomes, I think the important thing to understand is that biologically, African Americans have a less aggressive disease, which means that if given the right kind of treatment, African Americans are supposed to in fact have a slightly better outcome than even whites. And there’s one large analysis that came out of the VA system from the Dana-Farber group last year, which was actually highlighting that, because they were able to show that in an equal access system like the VA, African Americans actually had better outcomes, or better survivable. So, there are disparities at the time of presentation, at the time of how treatment is received, how timely is the treatment, and in fact also, outcomes. Because I would say that having an equal outcome for a racial minority is not necessarily lack of disparity, that may actually be underscoring the disparity.
