[btolliday]

Thalidomide & prednisolone maintenance - experiences?

by btolliday on Fri Jan 31, 2014 3:02 am

Hi all,

New to this forum and I am now 8 weeks post STC. I'm in partial remission (<10% myeloma cells in bone marrow biopsy, light chains normal, paraprotein is 7), and now progressing to maintenance therapy here in Australia.

Further, I am involved in a clinical trial testing the use of the drugs prednisolone and thalidomide as maintenance therapy. My main question is whether there is anyone else here who is currently taking (or has taken) one of these drugs as part of your therapy.

How did you handle the treatment? Has it improved your outcome in some way? And just what was your experience is with it?

Many thanks in advance,

Bev

[Multibilly]

Re: Thalidomide & prednisolone maintenance - experiences?

by Multibilly on Fri Jan 31, 2014 9:31 am

Hi Btolliday,

Welcome to the forum.

These articles could be of specific interest to you.

https://myelomabeacon.org/news/2011/11/02/thalidomide-maintenance-therapy-fails-to-provide-consistent-overall-survival-benefit/

https://myelomabeacon.org/news/2012/07/27/maintenance-therapy-for-multiple-myeloma-asco-2012/

https://myelomabeacon.org/news/2012/02/01/experts-publish-consensus-statement-on-maintenance-therapy-in-multiple-myeloma/

https://myelomabeacon.org/news/2012/12/10/ash-2012-multiple-myeloma-update-day-two-late-afternoon-oral-session/

You can find some good, recent discussions on this forum regarding the use of Revlimid for maintenance (Rev is in the same family of IMiDs as Thalidomid. Rev is the more commonly used IMiD here in the USA. Dex is more commonly used here in the USA than Prednisone...but you probably already know all this). While these recent discussions can be insightful on the general subject of maintenance therapy, and while Rev and Thalidomid are similar chemically and in how they work against multiple myeloma, you should be careful to not try and compare the two too closely for treatment, as they really are different beasts at the end of the day.