Changes in Weight in Induction Therapy | Ross Firestone, MD, PhD | IMS 2023

Hi, my name is Ross Firestone. I'm a fellow at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. A lot of our patients, when they're first diagnosed with myeloma, worry when they're on treatment that their body mass is going to change and they're going to lose a lot of weight during therapy. And I think part of the problem is that the way cancer treatment is represented on television, that's often something that patients see. And because patients ask us this question so often, we wanted to look at a study looking at a cohort of myeloma patients and measure their weight over time during their first stage of therapy, that induction therapy, to see if we could identify any patterns that were coming up in terms of changes in their body weight over time. So what we did is we looked at 400 myeloma patients treated at our center, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and measured their weight at the start of every single cycle of their induction therapy regimen to see if we could identify any trends. And we found that even though some patients worry that weight loss is a very common thing that happens during induction therapy, only about 15% of that 400 patient group actually lost a significant amount of their weight, more than 5% of their body weight during induction therapy. When we looked a little bit more closely, we found that patients who were already at a healthy weight or who were underweight before they started that induction therapy had a much, much lower risk of weight loss during induction therapy and were actually a little bit more likely to gain a little bit of weight during that period of time. We also tried to look if there are any risk factors for extreme changes in weight over the course of induction therapy, and we found that our older patients had a slightly higher risk of weight loss during induction therapy, and that was the same for patients who had a more advanced stage of disease. So patients who were diagnosed with stage 3 myeloma had a slightly higher risk of weight loss over the course of induction therapies than someone with an earlier stage of disease. Now in terms of how that mattered, you know, it doesn't really seem to make a major difference in terms of how the myeloma is ultimately managed, but that's something that we're continuing to investigate now to see if we can see if patients who either gain a lot of weight or lose a lot of weight during their treatment sort of changes the way their myeloma works. So that's something that we're on continuing to investigate, and we'll hopefully report back at a future meeting.