Amyloidosis Composite Response Score Incorporating the Depth of Organ Response

Background:

Systemic light chain (AL) amyloidosis is a plasma cell disorder characterized by multisystem deposition of misfolded immunoglobulin light chains produced by clonal plasma cells. Hematologic and organ responses with treatment have been shown to correlate with survival as early as 3 months from initiation of first-line treatment. Our group recently developed and validated a model integrating organ and hematologic responses for assessment of treatment outcomes at 6 months. Although current organ response criteria do not consider the depth of organ response, this has been shown to have prognostic utility in newly diagnosed patients. So, we designed this study to evaluate a composite hematologic and organ scoring system that also considers the depth of organ response at 1 to 6 months from initiation of first-line treatment.

Methods:

We included patients with AL amyloidosis who had at least one major organ involvement (cardiac, renal and/or liver involvement) and who had not started a second line treatment by 6 months from the time of initiating first-line treatment. For each patient, we calculated an organ response score and a hematologic response score at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 months from initiation of first-line treatment. A score was assigned for each depth of hematologic response as follows: complete response=0, very good partial response=1, partial response=2, and no response/progressive disease=3). To calculate organ response, a score was assigned to each organ based on the depth of organ response (Muchtar et al. 2018): non-evaluable=0, complete response=1, very good partial response=2, partial response=3, and no response=4. The final organ response score was obtained by calculating the average of the individual involved organ scores. We then calculated the composite hematologic and organ response (HOR) score by adding the organ and hematologic responses at each interval and compared overall survival (OS) between patients with HOR score ≤ 5 (group 1) and those with score > 5 (group 2).

Results:

The cohort included 730 patients diagnosed with AL amyloidosis between February 10 ^th, 2006 and July 9 ^th, 2019. Median age was 63 (IQR: 56-69), and 65% were male. The involved light chain was Lambda in 75% of cases. Cardiac, renal, and liver involvement were found in 81%, 61%, and 17% of patients, respectively. Among all patients, 28% underwent autologous stem cell transplantation during their disease course. The median follow up in the entire cohort was 7.0 (95%CI: 6.4-8.0) years and OS was 3.6 (95%CI: 2.6-4.4) years. At 1 to 4 months, we observed a statistically significant difference in OS between patients with HOR score ≤5 vs. >5. However, there was no difference in OS between the 2 groups at 5 and 6 months. These results are presented in Table 1.

Conclusion:

A composite hematologic and organ response score that takes into consideration the depth of organ response can discriminate 2 groups of patients with distinct survival outcomes as early as 1 month from treatment initiation and maintains its predictive ability for up to 4 months. The lack of predictive ability beyond 4 months in this study may be due to limited sample size especially in group 2 as more patients achieve deeper responses with time. This approach can provide the basis for early changes in treatment but needs validation in future studies.

Figure 1

View largeDownload slide

Figure 1

View largeDownload slide

Close modal