How Are Myeloma Survivorship and Treatment Planning Evolving? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

How have myeloma treatment planning and survivorship evolved? Expert Dr. Sikander Ailawadhi from Mayo Clinic discusses how patient outlooks have changed and the impact to patient treatment options and doctor-patient communication.

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Transcript:

Lisa Hatfield:

So how is myeloma survivorship evolving, and what’s different now than it was five or 10 years ago in terms of treatment planning?

Dr. Sikander Ailawadhi:

Yeah, I think it’s very important to keep that in mind. When I see a newly diagnosed patient, I’m not just telling them, “Hey, this is your induction therapy, and your transplant is the goal.’ We’re trying our best to decide that patient’s life journey with myeloma over the next 10, 15 and hopefully more years. So we’re trying to pick and choose the regimen that is most likely going to help the patient the most today and most likely will give a longer duration of the response.

So when you say survivorship, that also very importantly brings up the point that patients are living with myeloma longer. We have to manage their health overall. So looking for any side effects from treatment, managing them very well so the patient is able to stay on the treatment and maintain good quality of life.

There are actually, clinical trials looking at stopping treatment when there is a very deep, prolonged response. Again, going towards survivorship and giving the patient’s quality of life. There is looking for other cancers. In fact, I had a patient in the clinic and we were talking about just myeloma in general and I was telling them, “Okay, please remember you may not want to do a colonoscopy, but you already have one myeloma cancer diagnosis.

The risk of subsequent cancers is always there in any cancer patient.” So that was a male person. So I said, “Okay, please do not miss your colonoscopy. Please do not miss your prostate screening and whatever is age-appropriate must be done.” So managing everything because myeloma is not a sprint, it’s a marathon.

We want to make sure that we pace ourselves well so we manage all the symptoms, all the signs. Bone health becomes much, much more important because the same bone structure is now going to carry us longer and many more years. And as you rightly said, planning, which treatment comes first, which comes next, when does CAR T come? It’s not that everybody must get CAR T today. That’s not the answer. So what to use when becomes extremely more important.

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