Do lytic bone lesions go away with treatment? When I started treating myeloma patients, I was told, um, osteolytic lesions of myeloma patients never go away. It's a scar in the bone. There's no healing. Then we started to use more sensitive techniques like CT and we saw that, and actually we did an analysis of patients and we saw that about 75% of patients showed some kind of positive change over time. Together with our current treatment, together with Hidos chemotherapy and bisphosphonates, we saw that in 75%, not tremendously, but in 75% of patients, we saw positive changes and maybe we would see it even more in patients when we do further CTs along the line. So this is a very positive thing we learned from imaging that you can see here. There is kind of a bone healing. This is an osteolytic lesion before treatment and this you can see this white-ish that looks like the, to a certain degree, like the rest of the bone. There the body starts to heal this osteolytic lesion. You can see this is a rather big one, so it's not easy for the body to heal the whole osteolytic lesion, but it increases the stability in this area. There are some things we can do to improve that and I think exercise in the right dose and in the right setting can be something that promotes this kind of bone healing. Bones absolutely do heal and in patients who get into a deep remission, you can see their myeloma bone holes or lesions, they'll start to scar and they'll basically start to fill in but remember that the average age of diagnosis is 70, so you're not going to see quick healing because 70-year-olds, not that different than 40-year-olds, don't pull their myeloma bone back up and down very often and hence the healing is a slow process and needs and will only occur in the setting of a remission of the myeloma and so it's a slow process. You can see it on imaging but you're going to have to wait a while.
HealthTree • April 30, 2020
