How has your week started, myeloma world?

We hope it's going well so far.

We once again have a rather long list of new myeloma research we'd like to discuss with you. We sus­pect most of our readers will find at least one or two studies in the report to be of particular interest.

We begin today's report with a discussion of a somewhat rare eye-related side effect of Velcade (bor­tez­o­mib) and a possible way to control the side effect.

Next, we take a quick look at two articles about …

The results of a recently published study show that, among newly diag­nosed myeloma patients, African-Americans are less likely than white Americans to have the four most common myeloma-related chro­mo­somal ab­nor­mal­ities.

The authors of the study investigated how often the chro­mo­somal ab­nor­mal­ities t(11;14), t(4;14), del(13q), and del(17p) were present in two dif­fer­ent groups of newly diagnosed myeloma patients. One group con­sisted of African-Americans, the other of white Americans.

Each of the four ab­nor­mal­ities occurred less frequently in the African-American patients.

In addition, almost two-thirds of the African-American patients (63 per­cent) did not have …

Findings from a recent analysis conducted in the United States indicate that African-American multiple myeloma patients may have a lower frequency of certain chromosomal abnormalities compared to European-American patients.

In particular, the investigators from the Mayo Clinic found that African-Americans with myeloma may have a lower rate of chromosome 14 trans­locations.

Chromosome 14 translocations are typically associated with myeloma that is more aggressive and harder-to-treat.

The Mayo researchers note that, although their results suggest that African-Americans may have myeloma which, on average, is less aggressive than myeloma in European-Americans, there are many …