IMS 2025 | The psychological impact of being diagnosed with MGUS: insights from the SECURE study

The general principles of management in myeloma is now to diagnose people early and treat patients as soon as they reach the clinical criteria for treatment of myeloma. But to be able to do that, we need to be able to monitor patients who are diagnosed with monoclonal gammopathy in our clinical practice. The SECURE study is a study looking at patients incidentally diagnosed with monoclonal gammopathy in the UK. Because we’ve got a socialized health system, diagnosing and monitoring MGUS is something that typically happens within secondary care hospitals. We are recruiting up to 2,000 patients to look at a number of different parameters, looking at how they’re being monitored as well as how they’re being incidentally diagnosed. The results we’re presenting from the SECURE study at the IMS meeting particularly looks at the mental health status of patients who’ve been diagnosed with monoclonal gammopathy. What we’ve done is through agreed and validated questionnaires documented the mental health status of patients diagnosed with monoclonal gammopathy and compared that with the Office of National Statistics in the UK, which is a public health data set, and made a comparison as to whether people diagnosed with MGUS do have a mental health challenge because of the diagnosis of MGUS. In our early results, we find no significant differences in mental health between patients diagnosed with MGUS versus the public health data set. This is reassuring but more work needs to be done as patients are being followed up over a longer period of time but at least this gives us less cause for concern particularly if we were to undertake screening studies for MGUS in the future as has been explored in the iSTOPMM data set.

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