A Sex-Informed Approach to Improve Prognostication and Personalized Decision-Making Process in Myelodysplastic Syndromes. a European Study of 11.878 Patients

Introduction Sex represents a major source of diversity among patients in terms of pathophysiology, clinical presentation, prognosis and response to therapy, and therefore sex (gender)-informed medicine is becoming a new paradigm to refine clinical decision making process in different human diseases. Myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) are heterogeneous disease characterized by ineffective hematopoiesis and risk of leukemic evolution. We aimed to study clinical effect of sex in MDS as a basis to improve patient prognostication and personalized treatment. Material and Methods We analysed three MDS populations from disease-specific registries (Italian registry n=3015, Dusseldorf registry, n=1185 and Spanish registry, n=7678). Results We first analysed the association of sex with clinical and biological disease-specific features. These analyses were conducted on Italian MDS cohort. Considering WHO categories, female patients showed higher prevalence of single lineage dysplasia and MDS with del(5q), while males were characterized by higher frequency of multilineage dysplasia and excess blasts (P