Cancer. 2026 Jul 15;132(14):e70531. doi: 10.1002/cncr.70531.
ABSTRACT
The authors performed a systematic review and meta-analysis to estimate the prevalence of comorbidities among patients with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) by pooling results from 28 studies and 71,400 patients. In conducting this research, the authors observed that individuals with MDS have a high rate of cardiovascular disease that is 6.2 times greater than that in the general population. A remarkably high prevalence of heart failure (between 10.4% and 18.6%) was observed, indicating that heart failure is a major issue that warrants urgent attention in MDS. The prevalence of chronic kidney disease, chronic liver disease, and solid tumors was also higher in patients with MDS. The results of this analysis indicate a much higher prevalence of multimorbidity in patients who have MDS compared with the general population (79.1% vs. 63.4%; p < .0001). Furthermore, the data demonstrate that the association between MDS and noncommunicable diseases remains strong in both high-income and low-income regions, the comorbidity burden increases with higher scores on the revised International Prognostic Scoring System, patients with multimorbidity are twice as likely to die as those without multimorbidity, and a high burden of comorbidities emerges as a common problem in MDS, occurring in 35% of patients. These findings suggest that a focus on multimorbidity and a holistic, multidisciplinary, and patient-centered approach to address the challenge of common chronic diseases could significantly improve outcomes for patients with MDS.
PMID:42464613 | DOI:10.1002/cncr.70531