Maybe a short overview is warranted. Leukemia is a blood cancer. Cancer has two things in common -- certain cells in the body become abnormal, then the body produces large numbers of abnormal cells. In leukemia those abnormal cells are blood cells. When leukemia affects the lymph cells, it is called lymphocytic leukemia. When marrow (myeloid) cells are affected, the disease is called myeloid or myelogenous leukemia, such as CML. The four main forms of leukemia are: Chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), Acute myelogenous leukemia (AML), Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), and Acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL). Recently, other rarer classes of leukemias have been defined.
Leukemia develops when a genetic change occurs in the DNA of a blood stem cell (either lymph or myeloid), then the body produces large numbers of abnormal blood cells which do not function properly. In CML the 9,22 translocation creates a Ph+ stem cell that produces leukemic myeloid blood cells. In CLL it can sometimes be a chromosome translocation, but most often it is a chromosome deletion. If the CLL patient has a translocation, the prognosis is worse. Treatment for CLL is usually chemotherapy, but it is not very effective, and CLL is generally not curable. BMT is not very effective. Survival is generally only a few years after diagnosis, but some rare forms are not very aggressive, so survival can be much longer in those cases. Most CLL patients die from infection as their immune system loses effectiveness over time. You can see that CML is "fairly simple" compared to CLL, which can be very complicated. We are fortunate that so much is understood about CML compared to other leukemias. Our drugs can shut down the CML production line, whereas other leukemias have no such targeted drugs. So the overall prognosis for CLL is poor, but the best hope is that the person has the rare non-aggressive form of CLL. You can read more: http://www.leukemia-lymphoma.org/all_page.adp?item_id=7059 http://www.webmd.com/cancer/tc/leukemia-chronic-lymphocytic-treatment-health-professional-information-nci-pdq-treatment-option --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ [CMLHope] A support group of http://cmlhope.com ------------------------------------------------- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CMLHope" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/CMLHope -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
