VIDEO: Still limited understanding of multiple myeloma risk factors

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I mean, I think we still have only a very modest, rudimentary understanding. One of the biggest risk is probably aging, myeloma is more common as people grow older. So the median age at which patients get diagnosed with myeloma is about 68/69 years. So it's still predominantly a disease that's more cancer, that's more common in older individuals. And the incidence goes up as people grow older. So age is fun factor. There have been a few well-defined environmental risk factors. We know of, for instance, first responders to the World Trade Center. Firefighters, police officer who responded to 9/11 in World Trade Center do have an increased risk of multiple myeloma. There are some other well-defined occupational exposures. For instance, pesticides have been associated with myeloma.

But for the vast majority of people who get diagnosed with myeloma, there's not a clear environmental risk factor we can identify. So it's not yet clear what specifically in the environment predisposes people to develop multiple myeloma for the most part. And then there's a lot of work that's been done in the recent past looking at genetic changes and timing of those genetic changes. In terms of when, let's say for instance, a patient develops symptoms of multiple myeloma, there are now studies that have shown that some early traces of myeloma, genetic alterations that lead to myeloma can be seen 10, 20, 25, 30 years before a patient gets diagnosed with multiple myeloma, suggesting that there's a fairly long, late end period and the initiating genetic events can happen many years, sometimes decades before the diagnosis.