Recent major improvement in long-term survival of younger patients with multiple myeloma

Abstract

In the past, most patients with multiple myeloma (MM) died within 5 to 10 years after diagnosis. Within the past decade, several new therapeutic interventions have been introduced, including autologous stem-cell transplantation, thalidomide, lenalidomide, and bortezomib. We estimated trends in age-specific 5- and 10-year relative survival of patients with MM in the United States from 1990-1992 to 2002-2004 from the 1973-2004 database of the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program. Techniques of period analysis were used to show most recent developments. Overall, 5-year relative survival increased from 28.8% to 34.7% (P