A rare case of nasopharyngeal carcinoma in a patient with multiple myeloma after treatment by lenalidomide.

Multiple myeloma (MM) is a plasma-cell malignancy leading to a significant life-expectancy shortening. Lenalidomide is an oral immunomodulatory drug (IMiD) approved in the United States for patients with MM. Although the introduction of lenalidomide combined with dexamethasone (Len/Dex) has improved the outcome of patients with relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma (RRMM), it is a common knowledge that lenalidomide has been linked to the development of secondary primary malignancies in the MM patients, especially in those who use lenalidomide as a maintenance therapy. In the published literature, these are also many cases reported by clinicians in different secondary primary malignancies after the diagnosis of MM treated with lenalidomide. In this present article, we provided our patient who was identified nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) 46 months after the diagnosis of MM and 21 months after lenalidomide treatment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first case report related to the occurrence of NPC in a patient with MM after treatment by lenalidomide. Although it is not very sure that the incidence of NPC was associated with the use of lenalidomide, we clinicians should pay adequate attention to this phenomenon in the clinical processing. And much more cooperative studies of large numbers of MM patients are needed to evaluate a possible association between lenalidomide and NPC.