The earlier study did not compare matching rates between complete response letters and press releases.
Second, our reported matching rates might overstate the correspondence between complete response letters and press releases.
In fact, if no monoclonal component is detected by serum protein electrophoresis, immunofixation interpretation with bone marrow evaluation determines the type of response, stratifying patients between complete response (CR) and a very good partial response (VGPR).
For evaluation of response the International Myeloma Working Group IMWGG) uniform response criteria were used [ 15], but there was no discrimination between complete response (CR) and stringent CR because the absence of clone cells in the bone marrow could not be confirmed in the retrospective data.
The correlation between complete response (CR) rate, 3-year overall survival (OS), early mortality rate and four prognostic models was analyzed.
If these values were integrated in the area under the curve of days 2 4 (AUC 2 4) of circulating nucleosomal DNA, a significant difference between patients with complete response and those who were not responsive to therapy was observed (p = 0.042).
There was no statistically significant difference in ER mRNA expression levels (probe set '205225_at') between cases with complete response and those with residual cancer after chemotherapy (unequal variance t test, P = 0.09) among the ER+ tumors.
Differences between a progressive disease and a complete response and between a progressive disease and a partial response remained significant after Bonferroni correction (Kruskal-Wallis test statistic = 39.500 and 31.579, adjusted p = 0.010 and 0.007, resp).
Consistently with the results of the single days, AUC 2 4 of nucleosomal DNA could discriminate between the groups of patients with complete response and those who were not responsive to therapy (p = 0.042).
For these analyses, it had been decided at the start of the study to dichotomize the confidence level scores between 2 (possibly residual tumor/possibly complete response) and 3 (probably complete response).
