ASH 2024 | Impact of ethnicity on outcomes of high-dose chemotherapy + upfront autoSCT in patients with myeloma

This is again I have a very smart fellow working with me who’s very interested in looking at the ethnicity and race on the outcomes of course others have looked at that and the data are actually mixed. There is no settled argument there. So we looked at about 2,000 patients who had transplants at our center and we divided them into three ethnic groups that patients self-identified themselves as. And they self-identified themselves as African American, as Latino or Hispanic or non-Hispanic whites. So about 350 African-Americans, 400-plus Latinos and 1,170 or so non-Hispanic whites. So in terms of their characteristics, they were pretty similar because they were all treated at the same institution. There are some variations. But one thing that stood out was that patients who were identified as Hispanic or Latino, fewer than 40% of them received a triplet induction, which for the most part was the standard of care versus African American and non-Hispanic whites, where 50-60% received those triplets. So that was the only significant difference. But when we looked at their outcomes, we noticed that the final response rate was lower in Latino or Hispanic patients, fewer of whom received the standard induction, three drug regimen, and their progression-free and overall survival was also worse than the other two groups. So again, this is a retrospective analysis from a database. We did not follow these patients long term. There could be other differences that were not picked up, but it is an interesting hypothesis-generating finding. Other researchers have also commented on different ethnic groups or racial groups having different outcomes, and it may have to do with socioeconomic status, demographics, access to healthcare, perhaps some biological differences in terms of disease manifestation. But those are the things that we cannot conclude from these data. But what we saw was that patients who self-identified as Latino or Hispanic in our database, who had an autologous stem cell transplant, had shorter progression-free and overall survival. And this of course is something that needs to be verified from other centers also and bigger databases. So we thought that this was an interesting finding and worth presenting.

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