Lisa La on the Impact of Diabetes in Patients with Multiple Myeloma

A descriptive analysis of the Connect MM Registry (NCT01081028), a disease registry for patients with newly diagnosed symptomatic multiple myeloma, presented at the 2020 American Society of Hematology Annual Meeting & Exposition revealed an unmet need related to providing better supportive care for diabetes management in patients with this hematologic malignancy.

In an interview with CancerNetwork®, Lisa La, director of clinical research in the Center for Cancer Care at White Plains Hospital, discussed the implications of these study results and what she believes they point to regarding research moving forward.

Transcription:

It’s always been known in the clinic that patients [with diabetes] possibly had worse overall survival and progression-free survival, but there wasn’t a lot of data to prove that. Now that we have [those] data, what’s next? It’s really [about] providing the patients with more supportive care.

What does that mean? It could mean a lot of different things to a lot of different centers…such as providing them with [a dedicated] clinician to handle and better manage their diabetes, weight management, healthy eating, [and] following up on them. I’ve been doing some preliminary analysis on taking the next steps.

What other data I’m interested in after looking at these general findings were [whether or not] race plays a role? Do steroids play a role? We know in myeloma, steroids are a big backbone for all of our treatments in general. And does that play a role in why patients [with diabetes] did not have a fair advantage of getting the same treatment options as those without diabetes just because of their comorbidities?

So, there are a lot of interesting findings. When the data were presented, there was a lot of excitement. What’s the next step? Can we look at race? Can we do subgroup analyses? What about the [patients going to] transplant? There are a lot of things that we can look at from this data.

Reference:

La L, Jagannath S, Ailawadhi S, et al. Clinical features and survival outcomes in diabetic patients with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma (NDMM) enrolled in the Connect® MM Registry. Blood. 2020;136(suppl 1):49-50. doi:10.1182/blood-2020-137309.