What treatment is used for a solitary plasmacytoma?

 

What treatment is used for a solitary plasmacytoma?

so if you determine that a patient

only has a solitary plasmacytoma, which means that they have just one

tumor of myeloma cells or one tumor of plasma cells

without extensive evidence of it anywhere else, including in a bone marrow

biopsy, you can use radiation treatment, a higher dose of radiation treatment.

And in some percentage of patients that actually might be curative of the plasmacytoma,

although does warrant continuing to monitor those patients lifelong

to determine that or to make sure that they don't progress again

or have a recurrent plasma cell tumor or develop multiple myeloma later on in life.

solitary plasmacytoma is essentially one giant mass of myeloma,

solitary meaning one plasma, meaning the plasma cells like tumor,

meaning a big ball of it.

And the reality is solitary plasmacytomas,

we actually approach with curative intent.

There are many patients that we can simply cure with this.

You don't need surgery, you don't need chemotherapy,

you need radiation, and you need to get

to pretty significant doses of radiation.

We usually say around 40 to 50 gray

So this can take weeks and weeks and weeks of seeing the radiation oncologist.

But these are people that we can have a high chance of cure.

Now, there are two different types.

There's bone-based solitary plasmacytomas.

And we'll call extraosseous that are just in a soft tissue.

Nothing related to a bone.

Being in the bone gives you a higher chance of being cured

because it's kind of like the marrow inside the bone just grew out.

It's not that the cells necessarily spread somewhere, but either way, whenever

we diagnose someone with this and they have this mass and really not

a lot else going on myeloma wise, we radiate it, we go for cure.