BETA - What factors should be consider when determining risk?

There's a lot of different biologic features that determine risk. People who have disease outside the bone marrow presentation have a higher risk. Patients who present with kidney impairment that doesn't reverse have higher risk. Patients who do not respond to first-line therapy have higher risk, and patients whose disease comes back within one year of starting therapy have higher risk. Having said all that about those clinical variables in which age is included as a higher risk feature, most risk systems that physicians use in myeloma are biologically based. And those six biologic variables are beta-2 microglobulin, L-bumin, LDH, and the three genetic abnormalities, minus 17P, 414, and 1Q+. I think those are factors that each patient needs to understand if they want a more in-depth grasp of how physicians are perceiving their disease activity.