What testing is most important to monitor your myelodysplastic syndromes over time?

What testing is most important to monitor your MDS over time? So MDS is diagnosed by bone marrow biopsies. So you do need a bone marrow biopsy to make a definitive diagnosis of MDS. And over time, for most patients, we will do serial bone marrow biopsies. But for a more minute-to-minute assessment and also to decide the best timing for the biopsy, we follow blood counts because these tend to be a good marker for us and the thing that's affecting the patients the most clinically. So following those, you know, the anemia, the thrombocytopenia, and the neutropenia is very key in patients with MDS and gives us signs about when disease is changing or evolving. Blood counts are important to assess for changes or any transfusion needs for both red blood cells or platelets. Also patients, regardless they are on therapy or not, they will require periodically bone marrow biopsy for disease response assessment when they are on therapy or to see if they have any progression of their myelodysplastic syndrome. We look in bone marrow, the abnormal blood percentage, chromosome, and mutational abnormalities, which can change over time. And that is important that we do a periodic assessment of bone marrow for that reason. Some patients also can progress into acute leukemia, and that is important information for us to know as well because in some cases it's being treated differently.