ASH 2024 | The clinical characteristics and survival outcomes of AYA patients with multiple myeloma

So when we have patients with multiple myeloma or within multiple myeloma patients, we usually visualize in older patients. But we also have patients that are adolescents and young adults, aged 15 to 39 years of age. Which defines that usually the NCI has this cut-off of age and helps us as clinicians and researchers to segment the age groups and compare between them. So having that in mind we wanted to explore if there were some clinical characteristics or social demographic variables that could influence the outcomes in survival for those populations for younger versus older. So that research was done using the database of the NCI. What we did is we took the patients only with a diagnosis of myeloma and compared the 15 to 39 versus 40 plus. First of all, what we really did was a very varied analysis between younger versus older. Then we ran an analysis only between youngers trying to find something meaningful there and then over the 15 plus population, the whole population. So what we found? We found that the younger patients do best in survival. This is something that has been seen before in some of the studies but not all the studies. So this is something that reaffirmed that younger has a better survival independent of other clinical characteristics like age, sorry, like gender, like income, like place of living, or different treatment received. So we know that age is a variable that for sure contributes to [inaudible]. Now between the younger what we found, we found that the race particularly the Hispanic population do worse than other populations, than other races, but the other social demographic characteristics variables were not significant. That is different when we compare with the general population. In the general population we found several variables that we know and have been described in the past but this ratified that age, gender distribution, there are some racial disparities in favor of Asian populations and there’s an advantage in people that have higher income. There’s an advantage in people that live in urban areas compared to rural areas. And having treatment exposures, of course, as expected, prolongs survival. So that’s something that adds information for the literature at this time for the racial disadvantage, worst outcome for the Hispanic population that are adolescent and young adults. And I think that one of the most important things in my research is a call for the researchers that try to do cutoffs of age to try to standardize using the cutoff used by the NCI. Because when we compare the results, for example, in my research using this cutoff, I cannot compare with other previous researchers because they use a cutoff of, let’s say, 50 years of age or 30 years of age. So if we use different cutoffs, we definitely cannot accurately compare between studies and have different drivers in the future design of clinical trials because we usually try to find variables in those type of studies that could drive the recruitment, could drive the distribution in clinical trials in the future. So it’s just a call to standardize the cutoffs, to do a better interpretation of the information and then a better planning in the future for the clinical trials.

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