Prediction of patients with multiple myeloma eligible for second- or third-line treatment in France

Multiple myeloma (MM) is one of the most common hematological malignancies, with an estimated 4888 incident cases in France in 2012. The management of patients with MM has changed considerably in recent years. We proposed an approach to predict the number of patients with multiple myeloma eligible for second- and third-line treatment for the period 2012–2020. The input parameters of this model were incident cases of multiple myeloma from the Basse-Normandie French Regional Registry of Hematological Malignancies (RRHMBN) for the period 2000–2012 and survival rates among patients under and over age 65 from the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE). In addition, data on mortality rates and progression-free survival (PFS) were extracted from the literature. Our analyses showed that the total incidence of MM in France is predicted to increase by 29 % between 2012 and 2020. We used the proposed approach to predict that at least 47.8 % of first-line MM patients will be eligible for second-line treatment (and 45.6 % will be eligible for third-line treatment). Predicting the number of patients with MM eligible for a new treatment is a prerequisite to planning healthcare and calculating treatment costs.