Socioeconomic Inequalities & Quality of Life in Myeloma | Francesco Sparano, MSc | #EHA2025

My name is Francesco Sparano. I work for the Gimema Foundation, that is the Italian group for auto-hematologic diseases. I particularly work within the quality of life unit of this foundation. So we basically conduct clinical research in hematology and our unit specifically work in evaluating and assessing the quality of life of patients with hematologic diseases. In one of our work that we presented here at the HEA Congress, we particularly investigated the association between the socio-economic inequalities and the health related quality of life of patients with relapsed refractory multiple myeloma. Over the last few years, many studies have observed that there might be socio-economic inequalities for many health outcomes, including quality of life. So we decided to assess if there were this association also in this context. So we used data from a Gimema study, that is the Gimema Clarity Study. This is a study that involved patients with relapsed refractory multiple myeloma enrolled across several centers in Italy and UK. For each of these patients enrolled that were more than 500, we assessed their socio-economic status based on data from three information that are the level of education, if the patient live alone or not, and the employment status. So overall we classified the patients into three socio-economic status groups and we analyzed for each of them their quality of life. The quality of life was assessed by the patients themselves by completing two questionnaires, the OTC QLQC 30 and the QLQ myeloma 20, that were two questionnaires through which the patients had to assess a set of symptoms, functional aspects, and their quality of life. So overall we found that patients in the lower socio-economic status group reported a worse quality of life profile with respect to those with a higher socio-economic status group. In particular the patients in the lower socio-economic status group reported a higher prevalence of clinically important problems and symptoms and moreover they also reported more financial difficulties with respect to those with higher socio-economic status. you