Hi edo288,
When I was dx May 2006 my situation was similar to yours - I was 67 yo and had (and still have) RCMD. Your counts are much better than mine because I was transfusion dependent from start (have now received 100 units of packed red blood cells), my WBC:s were low but normal and my platelets 65 (now about 40). My EPO was more than 800 so I was never treated with Procrit because this type of drug have best effect if EPO is low (less than 500).
Your chromosome aberration – as far as I understand isolated Chromosome 9 aberration – has an intermediate prognosis.
http://atlasgeneticsoncology.org/Ano...ri9ID1020.html
Your doctor doesn’t know if and much less when you can get AML.
My professor – Eva Hellström-Lindberg – has told MDS patients at a MDS Foundation Patient Forum that the prognosis today is much better because we can get Procrit and similar drugs for low HGB, Neupogen and similar drugs for low WBC:s, iron chelation if we have iron overload after many transfusions and many drugs like Vidaza.
Many patients like me prefer supportive therapy and want to wait with drugs like Vidaza but I think it is quite OK to try the drug. Hopefully you belong to the 50-60% that will respond to the drug.
Nobody can tell you if you will get any adverse reactions and for how many days if you get them. You should always try Vidaza for at least 4 cycles. They can still only do the same blood work as they do now but many researchers try to find tests that really can show if the drug is working very early. In the thread before your post I posted info about such a test. Azacitidine is the same drug as Vidaza.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1...ubmed_RVDocSum
Hope Vidaza will give a good result
!
Kind regards
Birgitta-A
Asymptomatic 42 months after Interm-1 dx