Chuanying Geng, Guangzhong Yang, Huixing Zhou, Zhiyao Zhang, Yuan Jian, Wenming Chen, Yanchen Li

Department of Hematology, Beijing Chaoyang Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

Correspondence: Yanchen Li, Department of Hematology, Beijing Chaoyang Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, 100020, People’s Republic of China, Tel +861052011227, Email lychen01@sina.com

Background: Newly diagnosed multiple myeloma (MM) patients with circulating plasma cells (CPC) had worse prognosis, and it was important to investigate the prognostic value of CPC for newly diagnosed MM.
Methods: We retrospectively enrolled 718 patients with newly diagnosed MM and used propensity score matching to reduce the effect of different distributions of prognostic factors on the outcome.
Results: We totally analyzed 718 patients included 103 (14.3%) patients with CPC and 615 (85.7%) patients without CPC. Median overall survival (OS) (35.1 months vs 57.4 months, p < 0.001) and progression-free survival (PFS) (17.2 months vs 25.8 months, p =0.002) were significantly shorter in patients with CPC compared with that of patients without CPC. Univariate Cox proportional hazards regression analysis showed that CPC was associated with shorter OS (HR=1.740, 95% CI: 1.293– 2.342, p< 0.001) and PFS (HR=1.486, 95% CI: 1.149– 1.921, p=0.003). However, it was showed that CPC was not an independent poor prognostic factor for OS (p=0.243) and PFS (p=0.228) in multivariable analyses. In the propensity score matching analysis, patients with CPC had similar OS (p=0.309) and PFS (p=0.686) to patients without CPC.
Conclusion: Our study suggested that newly diagnosed MM patients with CPC had poor outcome, but CPC was not an independent poor prognostic factor for patients with newly diagnosed MM.

Keywords: multiple myeloma, circulating plasma cells, survival, prognosis