Prioritizing Quality of Life: Addressing Symptom Management Challenges in MPNs

Prioritizing Quality of Life: Addressing Symptom Management Challenges in MPNs

 

Myeloproliferative neoplasm (MPN) expert Dr. Abdulraheem Yacoub discusses common challenges in managing MPN symptoms, goals for improving patient quality of life, and proactive patient advice for optimal care. 

[ACT]IVATION TIP

“…you should be aware of your own health and your own health challenges and your symptoms, and you should bring to your doctor what is it that you’re bothered by. Some symptoms are a lot more challenging than others, like fatigue, fatigue, and bone pain. These are symptoms that are very resistant to many of our interventions. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying, and we should have an open communication between the patient and their doctors regarding methods to improve that, whether it’s drugs or non-pharmacological interventions or others that we can try for these patients.”

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Transcript:

Lisa Hatfield:

Dr. Yacoub, I’d like you to speak to some of the key challenges in managing symptoms based on the available treatment options. What are the most challenging symptoms associated with the different classic MPNs, PV, MF, and ET?

Dr. Abdulraheem Yacoub:

You know as we address patients with blood cancers ET, PV, and myelofibrosis, there are multiple priorities in these patients. One, we want patients to be safe and protected from the disease by lowering their blood counts to the right goal. For myelofibrosis, we want to achieve disease control by JAK inhibitors and reduction in spleen and consider curative therapy with bone transplantation. So the goals of care are multifaceted and multi-layered in these patients, but we always forget about the quality of life. So patients with ET, PV, and MF live with a high burden of constitutional symptoms that are non-relenting and they impact patients’ quality of life. They impact their psychological health and their physical health. They impact their personal lives and their professional careers. And we try as much as possible to mitigate that impact on patients’ lives and quality of life with the tools that we have. Our tools are imperfect.

Every time I go over all the things we can do, we can use hydroxyurea (Hydrea), interferon, JAK inhibitors, and then that’s it. And then we stop. And there’s really, we don’t have as many tools as we want. Of course, the field is getting better, we are getting better tools to help our patients, but we should always keep patients’ quality of life at the center point of healthcare. In addition to getting the objective metrics controlled, the counts in the right range, and the spleen the right size, we also need to make sure that what we’re doing to patients is also adding quality to their lives.

And my [ACT]IVATION tip for patients is that you should be aware of your own health and your own health challenges and your symptoms, and you should bring to your doctor what is it that you’re bothered by. Some symptoms are a lot more challenging than others, like fatigue, fatigue, and bone pain. These are symptoms that are very resistant to many of our interventions. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying, and we should have an open communication between the patient and their doctors regarding methods to improve that, whether it’s drugs or non-pharmacological interventions or others that we can try for these patients.


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