Updated January 22nd, 2019

Celebrating 77 years! Mel Stottlymyre’s Remarkable 20 Year Fight With Multiple Myeloma

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We’ve just learned that baseball legend Mel Stottlemyre passed away after many years dealing with multiple myeloma. Stottlemyre was a legend for anybody who cares about the New York Yankees. For a whole other community of multiple myeloma survivors, his longevity through the disease represents a watershed.

We can’t know everything about Stottlemyer’s disease, however, there has been an enormous amount of progress in the field of multiple myeloma. Ken Anderson, Director of the Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center at Dana Farber Cancer Institute and the Kraft Family professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School about some of the recent innovations in multiple myeloma, tells us , “There has just been a paradigm shift in the way we think about myeloma and the way we treat myeloma as a consequence in the way patients and their families can enjoy the much improved outcome. We actually treat patients earlier, before they develop complications like anemia, bone disease, high blood calcium, or kidney disfunction, therefore intervene early to prevent these complications.”

Anderson tells us that with all of the change we’ve seen, there is still progress on the horizon, “Very excitingly, the best is yet to come, there are major advances coming in the genetics and the targeted treatment of those abnormalities for individual patients on the one hand, and immune therapies, getting the patient’s own immune system to recognize and reject their own myeloma on the other.”

Dr. Paul Richardson, program leader and Director of Clinical Research at the Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, and I also serve as the R.J. Corman Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, is also excited about the innovations, “So the natural history of the disease in the last 15 years has evolved from something which carried really a dismal prognosis in the majority of patients of around two to three years, to now median survivals that are exceeding seven to ten years. And it’s important to understand what that means. Those are medians, they’re not absolutes. And so patients in my practice for example, it’s been such a wonderful thing to see them deal with their disease, go into remission and enjoy survivorships of ten, 15 and even 20 years. Something which not so long ago would have been unheard of.”

Multiple Myeloma is a pretty rare form of cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, about 30,770 people will be diagnosed with multiple myeloma this year and about 12,770 will die from it. Stottlemyre lived an incredibly long time for someone with this disease, even after it returned for a second time in 2011.

Dr. Nina Shah, a hematologist at UCSF, told us that myeloma can be one of the trickiest to diagnose– a diagnosis often starts with a patient telling their doctor they feel tired, weak, or have notices increases in the number of infections they get in a year. It also often starts with some pain in the back, hips or scull. After a diagnosis, a series of blood tests can help doctors understand protein levels, blood count, and your DNA. The DNA test help doctor’s determine levels of risk, which can help with treatment.

After myeloma treatment, recurrence is possible. Dr. Shah tells SurvivorNet that there are available resources for trying to keep myeloma at bay after treatment, including drugs that help keep the immune system on guard for the possibility of myeloma’s return.

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