IMW 2021 | Multiple myeloma and COVID-19 in the Czech Republic

It’s my pleasure to introduce the presentation that we’re having from the Czech Republic on the IMW meeting in 2021 in Vienna. Roughly, of course, I think that everybody knows what COVID is and how bad it was. It was very bad during the last autumn and early spring of this year in the Czech Republic.

So, we experienced a huge second and third wave of COVID-19 and we, of course, had many patients infected with COVID-19, with the myeloma disease. So, we were interested of how the results of those patients are. And we were interested in what were the predisposing factors for better outcomes of COVID-19 of course, in these patients.

We gathered data from 371 patients. So, it is quite a huge number from the one country. So, with many of them being treated during the COVID-19 or after the treatment, and we also had quite some patients were initially diagnosed with the myeloma and COVID-19, and those outcomes were not really very nice.

Of course, the major strike was, as I mentioned in November, December, January, and February 2021. The major findings were, I think that the symptoms in these patients were nothing really special. So, they’re adequate and probably expected to be what was in the general population. Some, one-fifth of the patients were asymptomatic infections, which was a bit surprised because one in five was not having any symptoms and still having a cancer with that. So, it was surprising, but otherwise, no.

We had many patients hospitalized, of course. Roughly half of them had to be admitted to the hospital. And the course of the disease was quite severe in some of the patients. So, roughly half of the patients required oxygen treatment, and many of them required also, apart from oxygen, more intensive respiratory support, like non-invasive ventilation or artificial lung ventilation. Out of those patients, I think it was really striking that when they required oxygen, then the outcome was really poor. And half of these patients eventually died. And even more when they required more aggressive respiratory support, like any type of ventilation, led to roughly 75% of the diseased patients.

At the end of the day, when we calculated the survivors and non-survivors, we ended up with one quarter of patients being dead after COVID or soon after the diagnosis. So, the results were quite poor and the death rate was much higher than in the patients with compared age without myeloma.

We’re also interested in risk factors of these patients who are about to die. More or less age was related to more likelihood of death; however, the results were not really that striking because the non-survivors were somewhat five years older than the survivors, which is not really that much. The mean age was 71 years in non-survivors and 66 in survivors.

So, these were elderly population. What was interesting that we aimed at obesity, which is a well-known risk factor for death of COVID and here in this kind of population, there were absolutely no differences in the survival rates in patients with obesity or without. And also what was interesting that none of the treatments were related to higher risk of death that was administered prior to COVID apart from monoclonal antibodies, meaning, anti-CD38 in majority. And those treated with anti-CD38 were at higher risk of death than those without. And of course, as I mentioned before, those meeting the criteria for oxygen or any regulatory support were at high risk of death. So, this is in conclusion what probably we found and on our set of 371 patients from the Czech Republic.