BSH/ISH 2016 | How the frailty score help guide treatment of older multiple myeloma patients
Sonja Zweegman, MD, PhD from the VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam, Netherlands gives an overview of her talk on risk stratification in older multiple myeloma (MM) patients held at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the British Society of Haematology (BSH) and International Society of Hematology (ISH) in Glasgow, Scotland. According to Prof Zweegman, a key question that needs to be answered is which patients will benefit from novel drugs. According to Dr Zweegman, performance score and age are not sufficient to answer this question. Prof Zweegman then discusses the frailty score introduced by the International Myeloma Working Group (IMWG), which takes into account age, daily activities and co-morbidities. However, there are no frailty based clinical trials to date, which means it is difficult to determine which treatment to give to frail patients.
