A comparison of two staging systems for myeloma.

The data were evaluated for 43 myeloma patients who had had complete follow-up. A comparison was made of the prognostic significance of the staging systems proposed by Durie and Salmon (DS) and by Merlini, Waldenström, and Jayakar (MWJ) for multiple myeloma. Both of the three-stage systems show good statistical correlation with survival in our global analysis, although a higher log-rank P value was found for DS. Moreover, only stage I and III survival curves are really heterogeneous in MWJ, while each curve is significantly different from the other in DS.