What are the signs and symptoms of myelofibrosis?

What are the signs and symptoms of myelofibrosis?

So most patients with myelofibrosis are symptomatic of their diagnosis, although up to 15% are not.

So the most common symptom is actually significant fatigue. So it's not that you just ran a marathon and you're tired afterwards, or you were pulling an all-nighter. This is I'm exhausted, and I have no idea why. And it's often progressive.

The other big bucket of symptoms are related to a big spleen. So you could have left upper quadrant pain. You can feel full after just a few bites. You might lose weight. And you're not intending to, which many patients celebrate in the beginning, and then they're like, oh, wait, I didn't actually mean to do that. So that's a red flag.

Having low grade fevers or night sweats are also common symptoms in MPN. And so if you have any of those symptoms, we highly recommend that you see your primary care doctor.

And then the other common presenting symptoms can be bone pain related to this overproduction of blood cells within the bone marrow and abdominal discomfort. So that is associated with an enlarging spleen and a lot of patients that can lead to abdominal discomfort.

Trouble with appetite, decreased appetite or a feeling of what we call early satiety or really a sense of feeling full when you're only partway through a meal.

So patients who have primary disease will often present with those symptoms de novo. A lot of folks will come in with a global decline in blood counts. Some folks can actually have elevated blood cell counts. It really depends on whether disease is more proliferative in nature. So more cells or cytopenic meaning less cells. What the clinical picture looks like. There's a score. We call it the MPN-TSS, or the MPN10 score. And we routinely ask patients to fill this out and to stratify against that patient each time they come in to see a clinician.

And it asks them on a scale of 0 to 10 if they're fatigued, if they're having numbness, night sweats, unintentional or unclear fevers, unintentional weight loss, bone pain, abdominal pain or early satiety, which is filling up quickly without eating a full meal.

So these are a lot of the symptoms that are associated with myelofibrosis that again, can advance as the disease can get worse.