Why carry out this study?

Comorbidities are known to impact outcomes in patients with multiple myeloma, but many patients with pulmonary disease are excluded from clinical trials; therefore, not much is known about this subgroup of patients.

Previous results have demonstrated an association between the presence of lung disease and worse outcomes; however, this impact in a real-world setting is not well understood.

The objective of the current study was to assess the prevalence of asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in a real-world patient population with multiple myeloma, and to describe treatment patterns in patients with/without asthma/COPD, and time to next treatment and overall survival in patients with asthma/COPD.

What was learned from the study?

These real-world data suggest that patients with asthma or COPD experience prolonged time to next treatment from first to second line, but have significantly worse overall survival from start of first-line therapy and numerically worse survival from the start of later lines of therapy.

Future investigations with larger datasets may improve the understanding of the influence of individual treatments on outcomes in these patients.