Will Your MPN Progress? What You Need to Know.
Will Your MPN Progress? What You Need to Know. from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
Myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN) expert Dr. Mark Heaney discusses how MPNs may progress from one to the next and addresses the possibility of slowing disease progression.
Dr. Mark Heaney is a hematologic oncologist and Associate Professor of Medicine at the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center of Columbia University. Learn more about Dr. Heaney, here.
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Transcript:
Katherine Banwell:
Patients living with MPNs are often concerned about disease progression. Will everyone progress?
Dr. Heaney:
Now, we don’t know the answer to that question. There are patients with myelofibrosis and other MPNs who we know live more than 20 years with their disease.
In general, the natural history of the disease is one of gradual progression, and some people have more rapid progression than others. We know that there are patients who will die of complications of their disease, but not everyone will progress, and there are some patients where observation without treatment, even in the face of some progression, may be a very reasonable treatment plan.
There may be times, though, when it’s not really possible to maintain a quality of life without some treatment, and one of the ways of slowing that kind of progression may be with some of the available therapies of – approved therapies and investigational therapies. But, I guess the short answer to your question is not everyone will die of his or her disease, even if the disease does progress, and there are some patients in whom that progression is so slow that they’re able to live really full lives without it – without the disease’s interfering with their lives.
Katherine Banwell:
Is there a way to prevent progression?
Dr. Heaney:
Well, there isn’t a magic pill that stops progression. A lot of my patients ask if there’s some diet, if there’s something that they can do that will change the course of the disease.
And, the short answer for, I think, the overwhelming majority of patients is there isn’t anything that’s a magic bullet. We believe that drugs like ruxolitinib in myelofibrosis can slow the progression of disease.
There are drugs in other MPNs that we also think may slow disease progression even if they don’t completely halt progression. For some patients – admittedly, the minority – who might be candidates for allogeneic stem cell transplant, we know that that can be curative, and so, in that way, that can prevent progression in those patients.
And so, I think it’s important to, again, go back to your physician, understand what progression means, understand what – how the proposed treatment might interact with that progression, and again, getting back to the question of outcomes and goals of therapy, understand clearly what the treatment plan is aimed to do.
