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Ma Awarded National Cancer Institute Grant to Research Understudied Bone Marrow Disorder

Xiaomei Ma, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Division of Chronic Disease Epidemiology, has been awarded a five-year, $700,000 grant by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to study the etiology and factors affecting survival and quality of life of patients diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS).

MDS are a group of clonal proliferative bone marrow disorders resulting in ineffective blood cell production. MDS was considered a pre-leukemic disorder, but is now viewed as a form of cancer because of its clonal nature. MDS was identified as understudied in 2003-2004 by Congress, which urged NCI and other agencies to further MDS research. According to Ma, the limited understanding of MDS’s etiology and factors affecting survival and quality of life could be due in part to the disease’s biological heterogeneity. The disease is most common in the elderly and varies in how it affects people.

Ma’s study proposes to 1) classify MDS cases into subgroups that are more homogeneous; 2) illustrate whether cases in different subgroups have distinct patterns of previous exposures (e.g. family history, medical history, cigarette smoking, alcohol drinking, exposure to occupational and environmental chemicals, and exercise); 3) describe the survival patterns of cases in different subgroups; 4) evaluate which factors determine the duration of survival; and 5) assess the health-related quality of life among surviving MDS patients.

“Findings from the study will advance the knowledge about the biological heterogeneity of MDS,” said Ma.  The findings will also “help guide future etiologic studies of MDS, offer insight into the determinants of survival, and better understand the quality of life of MDS survivors and factors affecting the quality of life.”

Co-investigators on the study include Susan Mayne, Ph.D. and Heping Zhang, Ph.D. from the Yale School of Public Health, Ruth McCorkle, Ph.D., from the Yale School of Nursing, and Azra Raza, M.D., Gladys Smith Martin Professor of Oncology, Professor of Medicine and the Chief of the Division of Hematology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester.