The age-dependent changes in risk weights of the prognostic factors for multiple myeloma

Multiple myeloma is a highly heterogenous plasma cell malignancy, commonly seen in older patients. Age is one of the important prognostic factors. However, nearly all the prognostic staging systems are based on clinical trials, where patients were relatively fit and young. It is unknown how the presence of biochemical or cytogenetic prognostic factors and their risk weights changes with older age. To further investigate this question, we retrospectively analyzed the data from a consecutive cohort of patients treated with either bortezomib or thalidomide-based therapy.

This retrospective study was carried out on a cohort of 1125 newly diagnosed multiple myeloma patients, from January 2008 to December 2019. Patients received bortezomib or thalidomide-based induction and maintenance therapy. Patients accepted hematopoietic stem cell transplantation if eligible. Statistical analysis was conducted by Stata/MP 16.0 and SPSS 26.0.

With age increasing, the proportion of patients with ISS 3, performance status score ≥2, and the incidence rate of gain(1q) significantly increased. We also found that ISS became less important in older patients. However, cytogenetic abnormalities exerted a consistently adverse impact on survival, both in young and old patients. Older patients had an inferior outcome than their young counterparts. All patients in our cohort benefitted more from bortezomib than thalidomide-based induction therapy, except for patients ≥71 years old.

ISS may lose prognostic value in patients ≥71 years old. Older patients had an inferior outcome and needed more effective and less toxic treatment.Plain Language SummaryMultiple myeloma is a type of blood cancer commonly seen in older people. To treat this disease, genetic abnormality, the poor physical status of patients and the abundance of tumor cells are the main difficulties. We often draw these conclusions from clinical trials. However, clinical trials always enrolled relatively younger patients, so the presence and significance of these factors may vary from clinical trials to the real world. We conducted the study to find out the real risk in both young and old patients. We found that older patients were more likely to have anemia, poor nutritional status and renal function. We also found older patients had more risk of relapse, progression or death than young patients. Frail physical status is the key obstacle to treating older patients, and tumor burden no longer impacts the outcome of these people. Bortezomib is a powerful drug to treat this disease, but patients ≥71 years old had less benefit than younger ones. More studies should focus on older or frail patients as these patients need more effective and less toxic treatment.