What are myelodysplastic syndromes signs and symptoms?

What are MDS signs and symptoms? Sometimes they have no symptoms. They're just going in for the routine blood work, their routine checks with their primary care, and they may present with anemia. That's the most common cytopenia or low blood count that we see. Others, they have fatigue and sometimes they think it's just where they're getting older. No, it might be something else or shortness of breath. You know, like they can't do the things they used to do. Like it makes, they start, they notice they don't have stamina anymore. And every now and then we'll have a patient who gets diagnosed because they're bleeding easily or they developed these petechiae or little purple dots that are associated with a low platelet count. Sometimes that's how they're diagnosed. But the common symptoms are fatigue, which is, it's tough because so many things can make you tired. Remember, myelodysplastic syndrome means the factory in the bone marrow is broken. It's not making the red blood cells, the white blood cells in the platelets that we need in our bloodstream. When those blood cells are low, we develop symptoms from them. So for example, many people who have myelodysplastic syndromes have anemia. Some of the symptoms of anemia are fatigue, shortness of breath during activity or when climbing stairs. Some people even develop chest pain. They get angina just as if they had heart disease and the anemia is essentially a stress test of that angina. Some people feel as if they're not thinking as clearly. Some people have a drop in appetite. If somebody has a low platelet count, signs are bruising, bleeding or continued bleeding after minor procedures like a dental cleaning. Signs of a low white blood cell count, a low immune system is that somebody may get recurrent infections. So none of these in and of itself would make a primary care doctor say, aha, this must be myelodysplastic syndromes. But when you put it together with low blood counts, particularly low blood counts in a couple of cell lines, so the reds in the platelets or the reds in the whites, that usually prompts someone to perform a bone marrow biopsy and that's how we make the diagnosis.