Prognostic Impact of Comorbidities In A Cohort of 788 MDS Patients Based On A CIRS-G Derived Score. A MDS Piedmont Registry Prospective Study

Management of neoplastic patients is strongly influenced by comorbidities, especially in more advanced ages. Due to that, comorbidities evaluation is a critical issue in the global assessment of patients (pts) affected by myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). Until now, there is no agreement on which comorbidity index (CI) is more suitable in this setting and different CI has been proposed. Recently a new MDS-specific score (MDS-CI) has been published by Della Porta et al., while the majority of CI in use has been developed in geriatric oncology setting. One of the most useful is Cumulative Illness Rating Scale of Geriatrics (CIRS-G). Aim of our study: Aim of our study was to test the usefulness of the conventional and easy to apply CIRS-G score among a cohort of MDS pts enrolled in the MDS Piedmont Registry from 1999 to 2010 in predicting OS and leukemic progression. Materials and methods: 788 patients from the MDS Piedmont Registry with CIRS-G evaluation at diagnosis were included in our statistical analysis. 78% of the patients were low and Int-1 IPSS risk, the remaining 22% were Int-2-high risk. The majority of patients (69%) carried an histological diagnosis of non RAEB MDS according to WHO classification, the remaining 31% were RAEB I-II. Age stratification was as follows: 10% up to 60, 23% from 61 to 70, 43% from 71 to 80, 24% over 80 years. Comorbidities with score up to 2 were considered mild while the ones with values higher than 2 were considered severe. We evaluated the global impairment of each patient creating two comorbidity scores based on the number of mild comorbidities (mild comorbidities score, MCS) and severe comorbidities (severe comorbidities score, SCS). Results: The majority of our patients showed only mild comorbidities and the comorbidities with the greater number of patients carrying severe grade of impairment are the cardiac (25%), hypertensive (30%) and endocrinological (20%) ones. COX analysis did not show an impact of comorbidities on leukemic progression risk while there is a statistically significant impact on overall survival of respiratory, renal, urological and osteo-muscular comorbidities (HR respectively of 1,18; 1,3; 1,3; 1,16). There is a trend of increased risk of non MDS related death in patients with severe grade of each comorbidity. Then we set up a Fine and Gray regression model in order to evaluate the global impact of comorbidities on leukemic progression and overall survival according to SCS and MCS. Neither SCS nor MCS showed an impact on the leukemic progression risk. Considering overall survival (OS), MCS showed a HR of 1,12 (p= 0,009) and moreover SCS has a strong impact on the risk of death (HR 1,59; p= 0,000). MCS remains statistically significant in low IPSS risk patients (p<0,001) while there is no influence of MCS on OS considering high IPSS risk patients (p=0,244). COX analysis stratifying pts for performance status (PS) and age classes confirmed the results obtained in the whole population. We performed a multivariate analysis and confirmed that SCS score (p=0,0006), age and IPSS (all p<0,0001) but not PS (p=0,22) are independent prognostic factors in OS prediction. Conclusions: Our data based on a prospective evaluation of 788 MDS patients enrolled in the MDS Piedmont Registry showed that CIRS-G evaluation is a suitable and easy to apply method useful in patients evaluation at diagnosis and during disease management. In our multivariate analysis IPSS is the most useful tool for leukemic progression evaluation, while SCS score (derived from CIRS-G evaluation) and age are the most important variables able to predict overall survival while PS at diagnosis does not add any useful information for this evaluation.

No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.