What Is Known About the Risk of Myeloma Relapse?
What Is Known About the Risk of Myeloma Relapse? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
Myeloma relapse is common, but what is known about the the probability of relapse? Expert Dr. Benjamin Dermain explains the significance of clinical trial data and the important role of blood work, including monitoring M-spike and light chain levels.
Dr. Benjamin Derman is a hematologist and oncologist specializing in multiple myeloma at the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center. Learn more about Dr. Derman.
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Transcript:
Katherine:
Is research being done to determine the likelihood of relapse and when that might occur?
Dr. Derman:
Yeah. I mean, we can look at clinical trial data for regimens that have been tested in the relapsed or refractory setting and say, “Okay, we know that this three drug regimen typically gives patients a year before the disease comes back.” Or “This one gives two-and-a-half years or three years.” So, that’s one piece.
But when you think about who – if you wanted to know ahead of time, “Okay, a patient with high-risk disease, they’re likely not to have as good of a response.” But nobody knows ahead of time the exact amount that they’re going to relapse.
But one of the things that we focus on, part of the reason that patients get a good amount of blood work when they have myeloma and they’re on therapy is that we have a measure in the blood, or we have several measures in the blood, where we can monitor for relapse. So, we can look at the abnormal proteins, what we call paraproteins in the blood. Either as the M-spike, is what it’s called, or light chains. We look at both of those to see if there are increases in those numbers over time.
When a patient’s responding, those numbers come down. When a patient is losing response and their disease is progressing, that’s when we start to see those numbers go up. And that’s often an indication that we need to switch treatment, even before a patient develops symptoms related to their myeloma.
