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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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Personalized Chemo for Myeloma Patients?
Personalized chemo for myeloma patients, as discussed in the article below, is a good first step. But only a first step.
FDA approved standard-of-care myeloma chemo for newly diagnosed MM patients is dosed exactly like the way dosing is described below- your dose is based on your height and weight.
I am a long-term myeloma survivor. Not only did standard-of-care chemotherapy not stop/slow my MM but my SOC chemo therapy plan caused short, long-term and late stage side effects. In my experience, there are two issues, two distinct problems chemo for myeloma patients.
The first, dosing, is described in the article linked below.
The second is also a dosing problem, but dosing, not based on body size and weight, but dosing based on
- Age-
- Stage-
- Symptoms-
- The patient’s health-
I will use the FDA approved standard-of-care therapy plan for all newly diagnosed MM patients- RVD-d. In short, the SOC therapy plan is 6-8 courses of RVD-d, followed by an autologous stem cell transplant, followed by low-dose maintenance therapy.
That’s a lot of chemo. In my experience, that’s too much chemotherapy for the newly diagnosed 55 year old patient who is stage 1, has no or mild symptoms and who is a healthy person.
Now compare the FDA approved standard-of-care therapy plan for the average NDMM patient. According to research, 95% of all NDMM patients are closer to 69 years of age, stage 2,3 and, being advanced, will have end-organ damage aka symptoms such as bone or kidney pain.
I think that the SOC therapy plan is aggressive for the advanced MM patient because aggressive therapy is likely to stabilize this patient.
My point is that young, healthy, early stage NDMM patients may not need or want the standard-of-care therapy plan that older, more advanced MM patients do.
Are you a newly diagnosed myeloma patient? How old are you? What is your stage of MM at diagnosis? What are your goals? Quality or quantity of life? Or both?
If you’d like to learn more about MM- both conventional and non-conventional therapies, email me at David.PeopleBeatingCancer@gmail.com
Good luck,
David Emerson
- MM Survivor
- MM Cancer Coach
- Director PeopleBeatingCancer
New system personalizes chemotherapy doses for cancer patients
“When cancer patients undergo chemotherapy, the dose of most drugs is calculated based on the patient’s body surface area. This is estimated by plugging the patient’s height and weight into an equation, dating to 1916, that was formulated from data on just nine patients.
This simplistic dosing doesn’t take into account other factors and can lead to patients receiving either too much or too little of a drug. As a result, some patients likely experience avoidable toxicity or insufficient benefit from the chemotherapy they receive…
Their system measures how much drug is in the patient’s system, and these measurements are fed into a controller that can adjust the infusion rate accordingly…
This approach could help to compensate for differences in drug pharmacokinetics caused by body composition, genetic makeup, chemotherapy-induced toxicity of the organs that metabolize the drugs, interactions with other medications being taken and foods consumed, and circadian fluctuations in the enzymes responsible for breaking down chemotherapy drugs, the researchers say…
However, that approach doesn’t account for differences in body composition that can affect how the drug spreads through the body, or genetic variations that influence how it is metabolized. Those differences can lead to harmful side effects, if too much drug is present. If not enough drug is circulating, it may not kill the tumor as expected…
“People with the same body surface area could have very different heights and weights, could have very different muscle masses or genetics, but as long as the height and the weight plugged into this equation give the same body surface area, their dose is identical,..”
“What we’ve developed is a system where you can constantly measure the concentration of drug and adjust the infusion rate accordingly, to keep the drug concentration within the therapeutic window…”
Journal reference:
DeRidder, L. B., et al. (2024) Closed-loop automated drug infusion regulator: A clinically translatable, closed-loop drug delivery system for personalized drug dosing. Med. doi.org/10.1016/j.medj.2024.03.020.