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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What is Maintenance Therapy for Myeloma?
What is maintenance therapy for myeloma? You’ve undergone induction therapy for probably 6-8 months, you may have also had an autologous stem cell transplant (ASCT) and now your oncologist wants to you undergo maintenance therapy for another couple of years, possibly forever?!
The definition of maintenance therapy is:
“Maintenance therapy for myeloma refers to a long-term treatment given after the initial treatment phase, like a stem cell transplant, to help keep the cancer in remission and prevent relapse by administering a low dose of medication over a prolonged period, with the primary goal of extending the time a patient remains disease-free; the most commonly used maintenance therapy drug for myeloma is lenalidomide (Revlimid).”
The short answer is that research has found that low-dose maintenance therapy can increase the length of progression-free survival aka your first remission.
The longer answer is more complicated. Issues to consider are:
- What was your response to therapy so far? Are you in complete remission, sCR, MRD, etc?
- Some MM patients never achieve a deep response no matter how much chemo they have.
- Some MM patients relapse while on maintenance therapy.
- What was your response, how did you handle all the chemo you’ve undergone?
In my experience, oncology prescribes a therapy but often does not give the MM patient the full, nuanced explanation of why a given therapy is prescribed.
MM patients can live for years without ever reaching complete remission-
MM patients can experience serious side effects from all classes of chemotherapy-
What is maintenance therapy for myeloma?
I am a long-term MM survivor. Research and experience has taught me that MM patients must walk the fine line between the damage that their MM can do to them and the damage that their chemotherapy and radiation can do to them.
And walking this fine line is very difficult.
Keep in mind that your oncologist will probably never mention evidence-based but NON-conventional therapies such as nutrition, supplementation and lifestyle therapies.
Email me at David.PeopleBeatingCancer@gmail.com with questions about both conventional and non-conventional therapies.
Hang in there,
David Emerson
- MM Survivor
- MM Cancer Coach
- Director PeopleBeatingCancer
Drug Duo Enhances Myeloma Outcomes
TOPLINE:
Adding daratumumab to lenalidomide maintenance therapy after transplant in patients with multiple myeloma triples the minimal residual disease (MRD)–negative conversion rate to 50.5% vs 18.8% with lenalidomide alone. The combination therapy reduces progression risk by 47% and achieves estimated 30-month progression-free survival (PFS) rates of 82.7% vs 66.4% for lenalidomide alone.
TAKEAWAY:
- MRD-negative conversion rate by 12 months was significantly higher with daratumumab plus lenalidomide vs lenalidomide alone (50.5% vs 18.8%; odds ratio [OR], 4.51; 95% CI, 2.37-8.57; P < .0001).
- Overall MRD-negative conversion rate at median follow-up of 32.3 months favored the combination therapy (60.6% vs 27.7%; OR, 4.12; 95% CI, 2.26-7.52; P < .0001).
- PFS analysis showed a 47% risk reduction with combination therapy (hazard ratio, 0.53; 95% CI, 0.29-0.97) and higher estimated 30-month rates (82.7% vs 66.4%).
- Complete response rates or better were superior with combination therapy vs lenalidomide alone (75.8% vs 61.4%; OR, 2.00; 95% CI, 1.08-3.69; P = .0255).
maintenance therapy for myeloma maintenance therapy for myeloma