Dr. Joseph Mikhael:
High-risk myeloma versus standard-risk myeloma. What's the difference? Hi, everyone. Dr. Joseph Mikhael, Chief Medical Officer of the International Myeloma Foundation, and I'm going to break down high-risk versus standard-risk myeloma in less than a minute.
Multiple myeloma is a disease of a wide spectrum, from low-risk disease to high-risk disease. What does that mean? It means that there are patients whose disease is slower growing and those patients that have a disease that is faster growing. We make this distinction primarily based on the genes of the plasma cells or of the cancer cells that we evaluate. So you want to find out from your doctor, do you have any genes that are high-risk, or are you standard-risk? This has implications for how we treat patients, how aggressively they get treated, and their prognosis as well.
For more information about myeloma, or if you have personal questions related to your own or a loved one's diagnosis, please visit us at myeloma.org.
