ESH AL 2018 | The ALL frontier: should T-ALL be classed as a different disease?
Speaking from the 2018 European School of Hematology (ESH) Clinical Updates on Acute Leukemias, Elizabeth Macintyre, MD, PhD, of the Hôpital Necker-Enfants Malades, Paris, France, explains why she believes typical B-cell lineage acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and T-cell ALL should be characterized as different diseases.
Transcript (edited for clarity)
Acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL, is much less common than acute myeloid leukemia in adults, but it’s the opposite in children, where there are more lymphoblastic leukemias than myeloblastic leukemias. And amongst the lymphoblastic leukemias, the majority are of the B cell lineage, and a small minority, about 10 to 15% in children, a higher percentage in adults, are T-cell precursor expansions...
Acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or ALL, is much less common than acute myeloid leukemia in adults, but it’s the opposite in children, where there are more lymphoblastic leukemias than myeloblastic leukemias. And amongst the lymphoblastic leukemias, the majority are of the B cell lineage, and a small minority, about 10 to 15% in children, a higher percentage in adults, are T-cell precursor expansions. T-cell ALL has tended to just always been lumped with B lineage ALL, but it’s a somewhat different disease. It’s less of a bone-marrow origin because thymic development, T lymphoid development happens in in the thymus, not in the bone marrow, and and I’ve been pleading for a long time that these leukemias are seen more as a separate entity rather than just a historically poor prognosis variant of acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
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