VIDEO: Increased awareness of myelodysplastic syndrome needed

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I think the disease is definitely more prevalent than what we thought. I think now with improved molecular annotation of patients and sort of understanding of these pre-MDS conditions that, you know, MDS is quite a bit more common in a lot of patients with cytopenias, again, may fall into that. So I think maybe the biggest awareness is just really for any patient that has a chronic cytopenia that is unexplained, like they really should have a hematology and potentially an academic hematology evaluation. Again, our sequencing tools are getting better and better and cheaper and cheaper. And really, all those patients should have, you know, that characterization because if they're negative, they're probably never going to have a underlying bone marrow problem. Whereas if they're positive, again, we already have ongoing efforts to try to prevent disease from ever occurring. And again, I think the more people are aware, the more closely we follow these patients. Again, can we change the natural history of this disease? Again, I think these key groups, you know, again, really got one great shot to give the best overall total therapy. And I think sometimes people really rush too quickly to use, you know, azacitidine, decitabine in different settings, and really, you know, is there a trial? We really need to improve the standard of care patients. Again, the median survival is less than two years in high risk settings, no matter how you cut it. And so we really just need to have this increasing academic community collaboration, full annotation of these patients, and, again, really working together to improve the outcomes of our patients.