Hi DianeD,
Since I am very afraid of adverse reactions I am not the right person to give advice about when to start treatment with chemo. Your husbands situation is different from mine since I still don´t have any blast cells (as far as I know).
In any case Vidza is supposed to be the best drug for patients without the chromosome aberration 5q deletion (75 % of them have good effect with Revlimid). At least 58 % of the patients have some kind of hematological improvement with Vidaza.
MDS is not a disease but a syndrome – an association of several clinically features, signs and symptoms that often occur together. Some patients have good effect with Vidaza, other with Dacogen and some with the new drugs histone deacetylace inhibitors like Epival (valproic acid) or Zolinza.
If your husbands blast cells in his bone marrow have increased since April 2008 he could perhaps try Vidaza (5 days in a 28 day cycle) for 4 cycles.
There are methods coming where they look at the degree of DNA hypermethylation during the second Vidaza cycle (Vidaza is a hypomethylating drug like Dacogen). In the future we won´t have to wait so long before we know if Vidaza or Dacogen will have effect.
http://abstracts.hematologylibrary.o...urcetype=HWCIT
Kind regards
Birgitta-A
69 yo, cx MDS Interm-1 May 2006, transfusion dependent from dx, Desferal for iron over load, Neupogen for low white blood cells, asymptomatic