Tag Archive for: revised international staging system

How Is High-Risk Myeloma Assessed?

How Is High-Risk Myeloma Assessed? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

Expert Dr. Jeffrey Matous explains how myeloma risk is determined, including staging, genetic analysis, and discusses the frequency of high-risk myeloma in patients. 

Dr. Jeffrey Matous is a myeloma specialist at the Colorado Blood Cancer Institute and the assistant chair in myeloma research for Sarah Cannon Research Institute. Learn more about Dr. Matous.

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Transcript:

Katherine:

You mentioned high-risk myeloma earlier. How do you determine if a patient is high risk or low risk?  

Dr. Jeffrey Matous:

Absolutely, so this is not uniformly agreed upon among myeloma doctors, but in general, we assess risk based on a few different things. One is called staging, and we stage myeloma unlike any other cancer, so it’s not staged like breast cancer, or lung cancer, or prostate cancer. It’s staged according to something called R-ISS, RISS, and you get, basically, a one, two, or a three.  

Those are your stages, and in general, if your stage III, you have higher risk disease, but even more than that, we’re beginning to understand how myeloma cells misbehave at the genetic level, and we know that there are certain genetic findings inside the myeloma cell that can convey higher risk features. It’s important to stress to patients that these are not genetic findings that they were born with or can pass on through hereditary. 

These are findings that occurred during the life of the patient that occurred by chance and developed inside that cell that turned into myeloma, and those are the genetic changes that we’re talking about. And we know that certain of these genetic changes confer higher risk disease. And in general, Katherine, if I see 100 people with myeloma, about 85 of the 100 will fall into what I call a standard risk category and about 15 percent will fall into what we call the high-risk category. 

Katherine:

Okay. That’s really good to know. Thank you.  

How Does Disease Staging Affect Myeloma Treatment Choices?

How Does Disease Staging Affect Myeloma Treatment Choices? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

What are the stages of myeloma, and how does this affect care? Dr. Abdullah Khan, a myeloma specialist, reviews how myeloma is staged, which genetic markers may affect risk, and the impact of staging on treatment decisions.

Dr. Abdullah Khan is a hematologist specializing in multiple myeloma and plasma cell disorders at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – The James. Dr. Khan is also an assistant professor in the Division of Hematology at The Ohio State University. Learn more about Dr. Khan.

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Transcript:

Katherine:

How does staging affect treatment option?  

Dr. Khan:

Staging is done by two methods. The older method is the international staging system, abbreviated as ISS. And then there’s the newer revised ISS, or RISS. 

The patients are assigned stages one to three. To determine the ISS you need lab values for the beta-2 microglobulin and albumin. For the revised ISS, you add on the lab value for LDH, lactate dehydrogenase, and you also add in the chromosome risk profile. So, there are certain genetic changes that predict a more aggressive myeloma. And the ones added to the revised ISS staging system are translocation 4;14, translocation 14;16, and deletion 17p.  

So, that’s the ISS stage and the revised ISS stage. There are also other factors patient providers look into when determining the risk profile for patients. So, that might include other genetic changes. 

One that is gaining a bit more traction right now is something called gain 1q, or amplification 1q, so more than one copy of part a chromosome. Some patients might have myeloma that doesn’t start, and the bone marrow might be found outside of the bones. And that’s called extramedullary disease, and sometimes that’s kind of high-risk. And some people have so much bone marrow plasma cells that it actually spills into their bloodstream. So, they might have high circulating plasma cells. Anyway, this will give information on staging.  

And in terms of how it affects treatment option, I’ll give maybe two examples. Let’s say in case one we have a 40-year-old patient high-risk multiple myeloma. The high risk portends a poorer prognosis, meaning the outcomes might not be as good as someone with a standard myeloma. So, in that case, I might try to do or use the most aggressive treatment option in order to maximize treatment responses because I know the overall outcome is poor. 

I do all this while acknowledging maybe the chances of having side effects might be higher, but that might be an acceptable tradeoff.  

In case two, I’ll flip to an 80-year-old with standard risk cytogenetics.  

So, I predict their myeloma to behave standard. In this case, I might try to use a regimen with a more acceptable safety profile, because the predicted response to treatment is anyways very good. So, I don’t want to hurt them in the process of getting their myeloma in remission.  

I’ll also say this. My practice pattern at The Ohio State University might be a little different than someone on the East Coast or West Coast, and that’s okay. We all have our experiences with the different treatment regimens, but we all have the same goal of being as aggressive as we can while being mindful of side effects.