Dr Elisabet Manasanch: Identifying Patients With Smoldering Multiple Myeloma Remains an Unmet Need

Identifying patients with smoldering multiple myeloma is difficult as they often do not have any symptoms, but we could still do a much better job than what we are currently implementing, said Elisabet Manasanch, MD, assistant professor in the Department of Lymphoma/Myeloma and Division of Cancer Medicine at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Transcript

How good are we at diagnosing patients with smoldering multiple myeloma? And once they are identified, what should be done?

I don't know that we're very good at identifying patients with smoldering multiple myeloma because patients with smoldering multiple myeloma don't have any symptoms, and we currently don't screen for this. So, this is usually patients that have smoldering myeloma—they may be identified inversion of normality in the blood that the primary care physician identifies or if they're sick because of something else unrelated, and then they have a test that is showing that there's a myeloma pertinent in the blood; but we could I think do much better at identifying patients with a smoldering myeloma than what we do right now. I think that it's important that if a physician diagnoses a patient with smoldering myeloma, this patient is referred to a specialized center that treats a lot of myeloma cases to make sure first that this patient truly has a smoldering myeloma and not something else. Then to see if there are clinical trials that the patient is eligible for that they can participate, because I think that we have not figured out what is the best strategy for these patients yet, and there are a lot of studies looking at these and it's very important to accrue quickly to these studies so we can get the results so that something can be done about this.