ASCO 2012 - Blog Post # 5

Monday Posters
Revlimid and Stem Cell Collection:

Dr Divaya Bhutani performed a retrospective review of 310 consecutive patients, and discovered that patients who had been on Revlimid may require one more collection session that patients who had not. However, there was no difference in recovery after their stem cell transplant.

Second Primary Cancers in Myeloma Patients:

Dr Giampaolo Talamo, Penn State University, performed a retrospective analysis of the records of 320 consecutive MM patients between 2006 and 2010. Two conclusions:

• Most patients had already experienced some form of cancer before their myeloma. For them, myeloma was the second cancer.
• Their data did not indicate that Revlimid could be a carcinogenic factor in most of the second cancers they found among their patients.

Rescue by Second Autologous Transplant

Dr Wilson I. Gonsalves, Dr Shaji Kumar, and others at Mayo Clinic examined the outcomes of 105 patients who underwent a second auto transplant for relapsed myeloma. Five percent died, but the rest achieved a median survival of 33 months. Those who had a long-duration response to their first transplant fared best.

Prognostic Value of LDH in Myeloma:

Dr Krina K. Patel examined records of 1247 myeloma patients all the way back to 1974 to determine the correlation between lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) at diagnosis to their length of survival. A value of 300 IU/L was the threshhold. She found that those with LDH greater than 300 IU/L lived just 16 months, while those with HDL under that mark lived 47 months, about three times as long. I don't know if this is really news, but it does appear that LDH can be used as a poor-man's cytogenetics, flagging those patients who are now called "high-risk."

Revlimid/Dex Long Term:

Dr Geetika Srivastava and others at Mayo Clinic studied 286 consecutive patients who received Rev/dex as initial therapy. The overall response was 86%, and, for those, the median time to first disease progression (for those who did not follow with an immediate transplant) was 25 months. Median overall survival was 7.4 years for those 65 and under, 6.2 years for those over 65. Conclusion: It works.