Myeloma Awareness Month and Acknowledging Early Symptoms of The Disease

March is Myeloma Awareness Month, a time to recognize the subtle but serious symptoms of multiple myeloma, including persistent fatigue, unexplained bone pain and anemia. Since diagnosis is often delayed — especially in higher-risk populations — raising awareness can help identify the disease earlier for timely treatment.

Dr. Joseph Mikhael sat down for an interview with CURE to discuss the often-overlooked symptoms of multiple myeloma in honor of Myeloma Awareness Month.

Mikhael is a professor in the Applied Cancer Research and Drug Discovery Division at the Translational Genomics Research Institute, an affiliate of City of Hope Cancer Center, and chief medical officer of the International Myeloma Foundation. You can read more of our conversation with him on the topic of Multiple Myeloma Awareness Month here.

Transcript:

Myeloma is a challenging diagnosis to make because there is not one particular sign or symptom [that] points us to a diagnosis of myeloma. Typically, the signs and symptoms that patients have are that they experience fatigue, and not just the regular fatigue you and I might face on a regular basis, but when it really is beyond what is normal, an ongoing weakness that is not typical. [Another] is bone pain, or pain in the distribution of our bones. This is often in our backs, where we have obviously a lot of bones, because myeloma attacks the bone. Often our patients — over half of our patients — present with bone pain.

And the third most common reason is what we call anemia, or a low hemoglobin. If that blood test has been done, a lot of times, family doctors and primary care will measure hemoglobin level in terms of what we call a CBC, or complete blood count. About three-quarters of the time, our patients have a low hemoglobin.

Now, of course, there's lots of causes for fatigue, there's lots of causes for bone pain, there are lots of causes for anemia; myeloma is not the one that comes to the top of mind with these very common things. However, when those are going on, and there really isn't a clear explanation, we want people to start to think about the potential of multiple myeloma. This is particularly important in patients who are at higher risk. Myeloma is more common as we get older, in particular, as patients get into their 60s and 70s. Those of us of African descent are at twice the risk, and individuals of Latino American background also are diagnosed at a younger age.

We want people to simply to be aware of [these risks]; we don't want people to think about myeloma every time they are tired, but when it reaches a point when they are working with their primary care provider and something doesn't make sense in [these areas], we want to think about multiple myeloma.

What is so important is that the diagnosis of myeloma is very often delayed. On average, people see their primary care provider three times with signs and symptoms consistent with multiple myeloma before the diagnosis is made. That is even longer in African American and Latino American patients, and that is one of the reasons that during this month, we have people think of these signs and symptoms, [making sure] that they are aware of them.

Transcript was edited for clarity and conciseness.

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