What is POEMS Syndrome?

What is poem syndrome? That's a complex syndrome, poem syndrome. It's an abbreviation of polyneuropathy, meaning tingling numbness, sometimes even other neurological symptoms. Organomegaly, meaning organs are swollen. Endocrinopathy, meaning that there are hormonal organs involved that can have changes. Monoclonal gemopathy, obviously that's what connects it to amygas and myeloma. And then either skin lesions or sclerotic lesions. Skin lesions can be certain changes in the skin and other sclerotic lesions can be an imaging where we see that the patients instead of the osteodytic lesions we know from myeloma, those patients can have sclerotic lesions. It's a very rare poem syndrome, but there are some criteria. There are major and minor criteria and then we can define if a patient who has neuropathy and an amygas, if they fulfill the criteria for poems, which is relevant because poems we would treat similar to myeloma, while a lot of other patients have, for example, neuropathy because of diabetes and a gemopathy and it's not connected at all. So if it's connected, then it should be further, there should be further work up to find out if it's a poem syndrome. I think there's no clear definition of it. It is a separate, similar to amyloidosis, which is also related to myeloma and gemopathies, but not exactly the same. So poems has some different biology, so I would not say it's a myeloma, but the treatment, because it's also caused by monoclonal plasma cells, the treatment is very similar to myeloma.