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Video

What is the risk of relapse with MDS?

Posted by
HealthTree Logo HealthTree
• May 1, 2023

Description

Learn about the risk of relapse with MDS in this video.

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Transcript

What is the risk of relapse with MDS? So MDS is a disease that is incurable with standard chemotherapy. So the only way you can cure MDS is by having an allogeneic bone marrow transplant at this point in time. So if you have MDS, let's say... So MDS is a little bit different than, let's say, lung cancer, breast cancer, where you make it go away and then it comes back. Like when it's gone, it's truly in remission. So in high-risk MDS, that's the case. Like we give hypomethylating agents, the MDS goes away, and then at some point it might come back. The chance of relapse is essentially 100%. If we were talking about low-risk MDS, what we're doing is we're not making the MDS go away in most cases. What we're trying to do is increase their blood counts because that's their problem. So we might do that by giving growth factors. We might do that by giving other medications. But those are not designed to make the MDS go away. It's not going to go into remission. It's just trying to fix the problem that the MDS is creating. So low-risk and high-risk are different, but for sure in either case, neither case is unfortunately curable with standard chemotherapy, both required allogeneic bone marrow transplant. And the chances of relapsing with regular chemotherapy is 100%, right? The chances of relapsing after a bone marrow transplant just depends on how you do the transplant. The risk of relapse in MDS depends on if one has a lower risk or a higher risk version of MDS. In higher-risk MDS, unless a patient goes on to an allogeneic stem cell transplant, almost 100% of patients will relapse after treatment with our first line currently available standard of care, which is a hypomethylating agent, either azacytidine or dicytabine. So that's why we're in urgent need of treatments to better improve outcomes for patients who are getting hypomethylating agents in the first line and who are not transplant eligible. In the lower-risk patient population, there is less of a risk of relapse, although it tends to occur when getting agents to help improve the bone marrow function.

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