Boston, MA - For patients with myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), choosing the appropriate treatment depends heavily on the prognosis. Those patients at the highest risk of dying from their disease are typically offered the most aggressive therapies, while patients at lower risk could live several years with MDS, needing only supportive care or other relatively side-effect free treatments. While some clinical variables are useful, current methods for predicting prognosis for individual patients are not ideal. Patients with the same clinical features can have very different outcomes from their disease. Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) have developed a means of improving prognosis methods and predicting how long patients with MDS will live after diagnosis by identifying certain gene mutations in their abnormal bone marrow. These findings are published in the June 30 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
