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.
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Myeloma MRD for 1 Year
Myeloma patients who achieve MRD for 1 year, according to the study linked below, are associated with long-term overall survival. In my mind, the question then, is does the therapy matter that gets the myeloma patient to MRD status matter?
Minimal Residual Disease (MRD) negative is a diagnostic term that means the patient has five myeloma cells for every one million normal cells. The study below talks about an autologous stem cell transplant and one year of revlimid low dose maintenance therapy.
But does the myeloma patient have to go through the aggressive toxicity of an ASCT and maintenance therapy in order to be “associated” with a longer life? To put this another way, does NOT reaching MRD necessarily mean that the MM patient will NOT live a long overall survival?
An important data point? The longest overall survival averages that I know of were illustrated in a real life clinical trial-
What is minimal residual disease (MRD) mean for the myeloma patient?
- Detection Sensitivity: MRD tests can detect one cancer cell among 100,000 to 1,000,000 normal cells. Techniques like next-generation sequencing (NGS) and flow cytometry are often used.
- Prognostic Value: MRD negativity is a strong predictor of good prognosis. Patients who achieve MRD-negative status after treatment tend to have lower risks of relapse.
- Treatment Goals: For many patients, achieving MRD negativity is a goal of therapy, especially in the context of aggressive or high-risk disease.
- Testing Methods: MRD status is typically checked after induction therapy, stem cell transplant, and during maintenance therapy to monitor ongoing response to treatment.
I am not a board-certified oncologist much less a oncology MM specialist. I am a long-term MM survivor who has been studying and writing about MM and the short, long-term and late stage side effects from toxicity since 2004.
Years of research and personal experience have taught me that toxicity from FDA approved standard-of-care therapies such as chemotherapy and radiation are almost as devastating to the MM patient as multiple myeloma is.
I’ve never found a study that looks as MRD alone, as an indicator or prolonged OS aka length of life. But I have to believe that MRD is the key to a long overall survival not:
- Induction,
- an ASCT
- both followed by maintenance therapy
as the key to a long overall survival. But that’s my thinking. Are you a MM survivor? What do you think? Email me at David.PeopleBeatingCancer@gmail.com and let me know.
Thanks,
David Emerson
- MM Survivor
- MM Cancer Coach
- Director PeopleBeatingCancer
Minimal Residual Disease Status in Multiple Myeloma 1 Year After Autologous Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation and Lenalidomide Maintenance Are Associated With Long-Term Overall Survival
“Purpose- Prognostic Immunophenotyping in Myeloma Response (PRIMeR) is an ancillary study of minimal residual disease (MRD) assessment for multiple myeloma by next-generation multiparameter flow cytometry (MFC). Patients were enrolled on a three-arm randomized control trial (Blood and Marrow Transplants Clinical Trials Network 0702 Stem Cell Transplant for Myeloma in Combination of Novel Agents [STaMINA]; ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT01109004).