[Greg H]

I've been negligent about reporting on the more detailed results of my six-month bone marrow biopsy. Fortunately, that negligence is more about being busy than avoiding the results, which were, frankly, pretty boring.

You might remember that the biopsy itself was pretty exciting, involving two docs, three holes in my backside, and difficulty extracting the actual marrow sample. After all of that drama, the pathologist's report drily remarked that the marrow sample was small, crushed, and inadequate for analysis.

So, we have no new info on that front.

The liquid portion of the sample was adequate for analysis, but produced results not much more interesting: no change.

Now, some folks might be disappointed with "no change" six months along in a course of treatment. But I was actually pretty pleased. The greatest worry I had going into this six month checkup was that the BMB would find something nasty -- like an increased blast count or a Monosomy 7 abnormality -- that would suggest disease progression and force me to consider more aggressive therapy.

Fortunately, that didn't happen. The principal investigator's conclusion? "Overall it looks the same as prior to treatment."

There was, however, a change in my cytogenetics that taught me something new about that particular analysis. The overall percentage of abnormal cells revealed in the analysis increased, but neither the pathologist nor Dr. Matt Olnes, the principle investigator on the trial, found that worrisome -- or even significant.

It turns out that "Metaphase karyotyping isn't a strictly quantitative test because of the few numbers of cells analyzed," according to Dr. Olnes. This makes sense to me, as someone with a just enough understanding of statistics to be dangerous. After all, you can't stop 20 people on the street, ask them who's going to win the next election, and figure you have the answer nailed down. You have to have a much larger sample to produce statistically significant results.

Back in September 2010, the results of my last biopsy at Wake Forest University showed 55 percent abnormal cells and 45 percent normal. All of the abnormal cells showed both a duplication in the long arm of chromosome 1 and three copies of chromosome 8 (Trisomy 8).

Roughly a month later, my screening BMB at NIH showed 55 percent of my cells with the dup1q abnormality, but only 30 percent of those cells with Trisomy 8. My latest BMB showed 83 percent abnormal cells: all of those had the dup1q, but only 13 percent also had Trisomy 8.

When I brought this to Dr. Olnes attention, he replied, "We do see patients who show fluctuation in their clone sizes by cytogenetics who are otherwise stable." So, absent some change in my actual symptoms, he didn't really see the change in percentage as significant.

That judgement would be different if some new abnormality had cropped up, of course. But, for now, things are essentially unchanged.

And "unchanged" is, in my mind, something of a relief.