Why Do Some Myeloma Patients Experience Chronic Kidney Disease?
Why Do Some Myeloma Patients Experience Chronic Kidney Disease? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
What do multiple myeloma patients need to know about chronic kidney disease? Dr. Sikander Ailawadhi from the Mayo Clinic shares insight about incidence of kidney dysfunction, healthcare disparities, and the importance of timely myeloma treatment.
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Transcript:
Lisa Hatfield:
Why do some myeloma patients experience chronic kidney disease?
Dr. Sikander Ailawadhi:
So at least I think that’s a very important question. Kidney dysfunction can be seen in as much as 20 percent of patients at the time of diagnosis, and there are a significant number of patients who would have kidney dysfunction even as they go on with their myeloma journey. And something that I work on quite a bit, and I’m interested in this healthcare disparities. I just want to point out that patients who are African Americans do tend to have a much higher incidence of kidney dysfunction and need for kidney dialysis with myeloma at the time of diagnosis or even with treatment. Now, I mentioned that these…or we discussed previously that these plasma cells, that normally live in the bone marrow, they produce these proteins and these proteins, heavy chains, light chains are part of our body’s immune system.
But when these plasma cells become cancerous, they produce a higher amount of those abnormal proteins, these proteins circulate in the blood, and they frequently get depositing the kidneys. So when these proteins are very high in number, an amount, these proteins can circulate in the blood and clog up the kidney tubules, and that’s where some chemical reactions also happen and kidney damage can occur. When somebody gets diagnosed with myeloma and they have kidney dysfunction, we have the option of the opportunity to reverse that kidney dysfunction if we treat the disease appropriately and with the right kind of drugs fast enough.
In fact, there is some older data study data, which shows that within the first two months, we are able to reverse the kidney function, then it is no longer a prognostic significant marker. And it’s extremely important if somebody’s kidney function is getting affected by their myeloma, that they need to be treated very aggressively to try and solve it and save that kidney function because the longer the kidney dysfunction stays, it is quite possible that it may become irreversible.
