COVID Vaccines Offer Only Some Protection for People With Myeloma

By Robert Preidt
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 15, 2021 (HealthDay News) — COVID-19 vaccination offers far much less safety to folks with a number of myeloma than to survivors of different kinds of most cancers, new analysis reveals.

The findings spotlight the necessity for a number of myeloma sufferers “to be especially careful — to take social distancing seriously and utilize masking — even if they’ve been vaccinated,” stated research senior writer Dr. Nikhil Munshi, from the Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

The new findings come from a follow-up to analysis just lately printed in JAMA Oncology, the place COVID an infection charges had been assessed in practically 60,000 vaccinated and unvaccinated most cancers survivors who had not acquired a systemic most cancers therapy equivalent to chemotherapy or immunotherapy within the earlier six months.

The new research in contrast 818 adults with a number of myeloma who had been vaccinated towards COVID-19 with an equal variety of unvaccinated sufferers who additionally had the blood most cancers.

Also included had been practically 9,600 sufferers with a situation often called monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS), which will increase myeloma threat. Half had been vaccinated, half unvaccinated.

Over two to 41 weeks of follow-up, the effectiveness of vaccination in stopping an infection diversified extensively. After two doses, it was 5.6% in myeloma sufferers, and 27.2% in folks with MGUS. This compares with 85% in most cancers survivors not on therapy.

Vaccine effectiveness began to say no about six months after sufferers’ second dose, the research discovered.

The myeloma affected person findings had been offered Sunday at a gathering of the American Society of Hematology in Atlanta. Research offered at conferences ought to be thought of preliminary till printed in a peer-reviewed journal.

Researchers stated the decrease effectiveness of vaccination in myeloma sufferers probably owes to each the illness itself and to its therapy. Both can weaken the immune system.

“We found that, compared to patients who hadn’t been treated in the last six months, the rate of breakthrough infections was 2.6%,” Munshi stated in a Dana-Farber information launch.

“For patients who were treated within the last 90 days, that number goes up to 4-5%,” he added. “And in patients treated with daratumumab [an immunotherapy agent], the number was 9%.”

More data

The American Cancer Society has extra on a number of myeloma.

SOURCE: Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, information launch, Dec. 11, 2021