Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia – The Most Common Childhood Cancer
About 3,200 new cases are diagnosed each year in children. Learn more about this disease and its treatment.
Leukemia is the most common form of childhood cancer. In the United States, about 3,200 new cases are diagnosed each year in children and adolescents under the age of 20. Mostcases of leukemia occur in children under age 10. There are several different types of leukemia that occur in children, but acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and acute myeloid leukemia (AML) are the most common.
Leukemia is caused by a change in the cells in the bone marrow. In healthy children, the bone marrow makes the blood stem cells that turn into the white blood cells, red blood cells and platelets in the blood. A leukemia patient's marrow makes excessive amounts of blast cells (immature white blood cells), which prevent the marrow from making normal red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets. This often causes anemia, severe bruising, slow healing of cuts, excessive bleeding, and frequent infections.
Children diagnosed with acute leukemia typically receive chemotherapy to kill leukemia cells and restore normal blood cell production. For most patients, chemotherapy restores normal blood cell production, and often brings long-lasting remissions in children. Currently, over 70% of children with ALL and over 40% of children with AML can be cured. However, for those children who cannot be successfully treated with conventional chemotherapy, more intensive treatment is needed. Often this involves a bone marrow transplant.
Bone marrow or stem cell transplant involves killing all of the leukemia patient's white blood cells and then taking normal cells from a compatible donor and giving them to the leukemia patient. Bone marrow/stem cells with the highest compatibility are usually brothers or sisters of the leukemia patient, but the majority of childhood cancer patients cannot be matched to a family member. In the past, this severely restricted the number of children with leukemia where a bone marrow transplant may be an option for curing their cancer. For those children without a compatible sibling donor, they need a voluntary, unrelated donor transplant or a cord blood transplant to have a chance to win their battle against cancer.
How You Can Help:
- You can volunteer to become a bone marrow or blood stem cell donor by contacting the National Marrow Donor Program or by calling 1-800-627-7692 (1-800-MARROW-2). If you're between the ages of 18 and 60 and in good health, you probably can qualify.
- Volunteering to become a donor merely registers your compatibility profile in the national program. You will only be asked to donate if a patient who needs a transplant matches your profile.
- Millions of people have registered to be a potential bone marrow or stem cell donor and 11,000 individuals have donated marrow for unrelated patients since 1987.
