ASH 2024 | A nationwide population-based study on the incidence of infections in CLL and multiple myeloma

Okay, so this is a large registry-based study of more than 15,000 patients with CLL and multiple myeloma in Sweden. And we look into the risk of infections over time. So we can capture the infections by specialist outpatient care, inpatient hospitalizations or antibiotic use. And we could see that 60% of our patients are burdened by a secondary care infection over time. And the most common type of infections were pneumonia for the bacterial ones and herpes zoster for the viral ones. And we did see over time that multiple myeloma patients had an increase in the risk of infections in the most recent calendar period. And I think that is due to more intensive treatment and more patients surviving. And then we also looked into mortality. And we looked both into the main cause of death and the contributing cause of death. And for CLL, 10% of the patients died with an infection as the main cause of death and 36% as a contributing cause of death. For multiple myeloma patients, 5% had it as the main cause of death and 25% as the contributing cause of death. So I think this calls for the awareness of finding infections and also that we should try to prevent it in all ways we can. I mean we could check for hypogammaglobulinemia and treat the patients with, for example, gamma globulin – that’s one option. Also, in some rare cases, you could give prophylaxis, of course, and I should also mention this is only capturing full-blown infection – it doesn’t capture the use of prophylactic treatment, and all patients were given prophylactic treatment according to guidelines.

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