[Little Monkey]

What happens to a lytic lesion after treatment?

by Little Monkey on Mon Oct 12, 2015 11:07 pm

What happens to a lytic bone lesion with (successful) treatment for multiple myeloma? Does the lesion disappear and then just heal and revert back to bone?

[JimNY]

Re: What happens to a lytic lesion after treatment?

by JimNY on Tue Oct 13, 2015 1:52 pm

Hi LM,

As far as I can recall from previous discussions here in the forum, lesions can heal, but it's not guaranteed. See this earlier discussion, which also has some really dramatic xrays showing how bone healing happened for one myeloma patient:

"Bone pain, bone healing, and treatment?" (started Feb 27, 2015)

Also, you can find a lot of discussions on this subject here in the forum, and you may find some additional information that is helpful. Here is a search that I did that turned up a number of threads that might be useful.

[LisaE]

Re: What happens to a lytic lesion after treatment?

by LisaE on Tue Oct 13, 2015 7:14 pm

As I understand it after looking into it some more, even when lesions fill in (as my husband's remarkable xrays show), they are not modeled with the same structure as bone, and so they are not as strong. That being said, bone healing in older patients is slow even without myeloma, and as some of the novel treatments do stimulate the osteoblasts rather than just suppressing the osteoclasts, I'm not ruling out seeing the healed regions developing more bone-like structure over time.

The researcher in me wants to get my husband scanned with things that let us see more clearly what exactly happened in there, but he's not a lab rat, and the BC Cancer Centre isn't planning to indulge me.

And my husband continues to thrive. No monoclonal band, and he's at the gym or yoga nearly every day.

Cheers,

Lisa

[Little Monkey]

Re: What happens to a lytic lesion after treatment?

by Little Monkey on Tue Oct 13, 2015 10:13 pm

Thanks for the responses.

I didn't realize there where so many forum threads on the issue.