Lower Socioeconomic Status Tied to Worse Quality of Life in R/R Multiple Myeloma: Francesco Sparano, MSc

In part 1 of an interview at the 2025 European Hematology Association Congress in Milan, Italy, Francesco Sparano, MSc, a research associate in the health outcomes research unit at the Italian-based GIMEMA Foundation, summarizes the background, objectives, and findings of his abstract, “Association Between Socio-economic Inequalities and Health-Related Quality of Life of Patients With Relapsed/Refractory Multiple Myeloma: Analysis From the GIMEMA-CLARITY Study."

As the lead investigator of the study, he presented these results today during the session, "Quality of Life and Hematology."

This transcript was lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

Can you describe the financial difficulties commonly experienced by patients with relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma and how these may affect their overall well-being?

For this work, we did not explore in detail which are the main causes of financial difficulties explored by patients with relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma, but based on previous work done in hematology and other diseases in countries like Italy, we can hypothesize that there are some expenses that patients, even [with] universal care coverage, must afford.

For example, expenses for transportation to be [taken] to another region of the country, or to afford the payment for supportive treatment. Even if the majority of treatments are not paid by [the] patient, there are some parts of the treatment that should be paid out-of-pocket.

Given these challenges, what was the objective of your analysis? Can you summarize the key findings?

In previous studies, it was observed that there are socioeconomic inequalities in health outcomes, for example, in survival, including in patients with multiple myeloma. It was observed in previous studies that these socioeconomic inequalities may affect, also, the quality of life of patients. Based on this background, we decided to explore, also, if these inequalities affect patients with relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma in countries like Italy and the UK.

To do this, we used the data from a study, the [GIMEMA-]CLARITY study, [which] is a longitudinal study that enrolled patients with relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma with the main objective of exploring and investigating their quality of life.

For each of these patients, we also calculated their socioeconomic status based on information from 3 variables: the level of education, the employment status, and the living arrangement, so if the patient lives alone or with others. Based on this, we classify the patients into 3 categories of socioeconomic status: low, middle, and high socioeconomic status.

Patients in that study also completed a set of patient-reported outcome measures, through which they had to self-evaluate a set of symptoms, functional aspects, and global health status. We analyzed the mean differences in the scores of this questionnaire between the socioeconomic status groups.

We have found that, overall, patients with a low socioeconomic status also reported a lower quality of life. We have also calculated the prevalence of clinically important problems and symptoms for each patient. With this prevalence, we wanted to reflect the number of patients [who] reported a level of impairment or symptom that limited their daily life.

We have observed, also in this case, for all these cases, all the symptoms and problems, a higher prevalence of clinically important problems [was] reported for patients with low socioeconomic status. This prevalence tended to decrease with [the] increasing of socioeconomic status for most scales.