VIDEO: Myeloma control paramount for quality of life

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That's a great question, because quality of life is a very important concept that we need always to focus on, treating multiple myeloma. and quality of life is something that need to be looked at in more depth for late-stage myeloma, because at that time, as we indicated, patients may have other issues, including other medical problems that they are seeing, for example, different physicians to take care of. Patients tend to have heart disease, they have other comorbidities that we need to pay an attention to. We also need to realize the fact that some of the drugs that we give may reflect in some side effects, including, for example, peripheral neuropathy that may affect quality of life in a negative way.

So we actually need to always to control the patient myeloma to help with quality of life, because we know that uncontrolled myeloma results in, for example, either bone disease or fractures, could have been also resulting in some worsening of organ function and so on. So it's very important to control the multiple myeloma by the availability of good therapies for later lines and that will likely preserve or improve the patient quality of life. But we also need to focus on supportive measures, and that could have include things to prevent trouble, including, for example, treatments to prevent infections that could have been more common in late-stage myeloma, vaccinations, you know, even support with certain drugs, for example, like IVIG, that we now use it for patients who are on immune-based therapies like bispecific antibodies to prevent infections, which will ultimately result in worsening of the patient quality of life. And finally, I think we need to look at the patient individually and see if the patient has specific problems. For example, pain related problems related to bone disease that could have get worse with longer duration after diagnosis of myeloma. And try to address that either with, you know, tools like physical therapy or pain medications or even some other tools which include, you know, patient-specific problems that they may encounter.