Abstracts of Clinical Meeting on 12-July-2002
Pilot Survey Of Younger Myeloma Patients Not Undergoing Blood or Marrow Transplantation
TCM (Curly) Morris. Consultant Haematologist. Belfast City Hospital. Northern Ireland
With the exception of young patients with an allogenic donor, at least one autologous peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) transplant is now generally accepted as the standard of care for younger patients with myeloma. The aim of this study is to identify the number of patients, suitable for, but not finally coming to transplant and their reasons for not being transplanted. The survey was undertaken by identifying all patients with myeloma in 2 regions, (A) Northern Ireland and (B) Northern Region (England) using the well established haematological malignancy data registries in these regions.
Patients over the age of 60 were excluded and a one page questionnaire was completed for each of the patients who had not received peripheral blood stem cell transplantation. Sixteen patients under the age of 60 were identified, 10 of these had received transplantation. The main reasons for non-transplantation were: resistant or progressive disease, co-morbidity and patient choice.
In view of the small numbers of non-transplanted patients the pilot study was extended by including the second 6 months of the year in the Northern region and by looking at patients between the ages of 60-70 in the Northern Ireland region. This additional data will be presented and compared with the data obtained from the first part of the survey.