Recently Diagnosed or Relapsed? Stop Looking For a Miracle Cure, and Use Evidence-Based Therapies To Enhance Your Treatment and Prolong Your Remission
Multiple Myeloma an incurable disease, but I have spent the last 25 years in remission using a blend of conventional oncology and evidence-based nutrition, supplementation, and lifestyle therapies from peer-reviewed studies that your oncologist probably hasn't told you about.
Click the orange button to the right to learn more about what you can start doing today.
Continuous treatment (CT) is a key strategy for MM treatment, since it improves duration of remission.
Could continuous treatment of multiple myeloma challenge the two problems faced by all MMers? All MMers relapse. All MMers eventually achieve MDR or multi-drug resistance. The common wisdom is that high doses of chemotherapy require vacations from the high-dose chemotherapy. The therapy vacations then allow the MM time to develop resistance to chemotherapy.
According to the study linked and excerpted below, continuous treatment extends progression-free survival when compared to fixed-duration treatment (FDT).
To be clear, the second study below said nothing about metronomic chemotherapy. Since the study uses the term continuous therapy that sounded like what I have come to learn is called metronomic therapy, I put both terms in the same blog post.
The definitions of the two phrases aren’t exactly the same. The concepts sounded so similar to me that I thought newly diagnosed MMers should learn about the lower study’s findings.
Further, now that low-dose maintenance therapy has become standard treatment in MM, I thought that low-dose metronomic/continuous therapy as a concept would be an easy leap to make. For example, could a newly diagnosed, stage 1 MM achieve a longer progression-free survival with 5 mg of revlimid (plus dex.), while experiencing fewer side effects?
Could this MMer who is undergoing low-dose continuous therapy, achieve an even longer PFS by adding anti-angiogenic foods and supplementation to his/her regimen?
Food for thought.
If you or a loved one have been diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, let me say this loud and clear:
I am alive today largely because I took the time to find out everything I could about Multiple Myeloma and sought out the full spectrum of evidence-based MM therapies both conventional (FDA approved) and non-conventional.
Please watch the video below to learn more about the evidence-based, integrative therapies to combat treatment side effects and enhance your chemotherapy.
Have you been diagnosed with multiple myeloma? Scroll down the page, post a question or comment and I will reply to you ASAP.
“The introduction of the “maximum tolerated dose” in usual treatment protocols (and its concomitant overt toxicity) made necessary the imposition of rest periods between cycles of therapy—a practice that not only involves re-growth of tumour cells, but also growth of selected clones resistant to the therapy.
To avoid the problems caused by traditional chemotherapeutic regimens, a new modality of drug administration called “metronomic chemotherapy” has been proposed. This name makes reference to the chronic, equally spaced administration of (generally) low doses of various chemotherapeutic drugs without extended rest periods. The novelty of this treatment modality lies not only in its antitumour efficacy with very low toxicity, but also in a cell target switch, now aiming at tumour endothelial cells…”
“Background-Risk-adapted therapy is a common strategy in curable hematologic malignancies: standard-risk patients receive less intensive treatment, whereas high-risk patients require a more intensive approach. This model cannot be applied in multiple myeloma (MM), which is still incurable.
Continuous treatment (CT) is a key strategy for MM treatment, since it improves duration of remission. However, the role of CT according to standard- or high-risk baseline prognosis remains an open question.
Patients and methods-We performed a pooled analysis of 2 phase III trials (GIMEMA-MM-03-05 and RV-MM-PI-209) that randomized patients to CT vs fixed-duration therapy (FDT).
Results-In the overall patient population (n = 550),
CT improved PFS1 both in R-ISS I (HR 0.49) and R-ISS II/III patients.
Four-year PFS1 was 38% in R-ISS II/III patients receiving CT and 25% in R-ISS I patients receiving FDT, with similar trends for PFS2 and OS.
High-risk patients benefited more from proteasome-inhibitor plus immunomodulatory-based CT than immunomodulatory alone.
Conclusion- Good prognosis patients receiving FDT lose their prognostic advantage over high-risk patients receiving CT and high-risk patients may benefit from more intensive maintenance including proteasome inhibitors and immunomodulators.”
