What You Need to Know

What Achieving uMRD Means for Your Prognosis

Achieving uMRD is a reliable sign that treatment worked as well as it could, and it indicates a much lower risk of the leukemia becoming active again, says McCloskey. While other factors, such as genetic biomarkers, age, and overall health, also influence your prognosis, here’s why doctors consider uMRD such a significant milestone.

Longer Progression-Free Survival

One meaningful way doctors measure treatment success is through progression-free survival (PFS). This refers to the time a person lives without the disease worsening — in essence, how long they spend feeling well without needing additional treatment.

People who achieve uMRD typically have a longer PFS than those with detectable MRD, says Cloe, even if pathologists can only detect leukemia cells with highly sensitive MRD tests.

That’s because when treatment reduces the number of leukemia cells to levels so low that even highly sensitive tests can’t detect them, disease-worsening cell growth in any remaining cells generally takes significantly longer, says McCloskey.

In fact, in one large analysis of nearly 2,800 people with CLL, about 92 percent of people who achieved uMRD were living without disease progression at two years, compared with about 75 percent of those who had not achieved uMRD.

Guidance for Treatment Decisions

Achieving uMRD has become a primary goal of modern, fixed-duration therapies. Unlike continuous therapies, which a person takes indefinitely to control CLL, fixed-duration treatments are taken for a set period and then stopped.

For many people, achieving uMRD gives a care team confidence that treatment has worked well enough to safely stop fixed-duration treatments as planned, says McCloskey.

Monitoring remains vital after finishing fixed-duration treatment and achieving uMRD. For people on fixed-duration therapies, a cancer care team will typically check MRD every three to six months during active treatment. Testing might take place every 6 to 12 months once therapy stops, as this can help your cancer care team detect any early signs of returning (or relapsing) CLL before symptoms develop, says McCloskey. He adds that people on continuous therapies don’t usually undergo routine MRD testing.