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About Leukemia

Click on the underlined words for more information.

Leukemia… you know it’s deadly, but how much else do you really know about this terrifying disease?

Leukemia is a kind of cancer. It is the most common kind of cancer in children and adolescents. Leukemia starts in the bone marrow – which is the soft squishy substance in the inside of your bones. After it starts, it often spreads into the bloodstream, which can carry the disease to other parts of your body, such as the liver, spleen, and central nervous system, among others. Most other cancers start in the organs and then spread to the bone marrow, so leukemia is rather a unique disease.

In general, there are two kinds of leukemia: chronic and acute. Chronic means the disease worsens slowly, while acute means the disease worsens quickly. If acute leukemia were not treated, patients could die within a few months.

There are two main types of leukemia that children develop:

ALL (acute lymphocytic leukemia)
AML (acute myelogenous leukemia)
Some children can have a mixture of both of these kinds of leukemia. These are called hybrid or mixed lineage leukemias. Normally, they are treated as ALL. There is also another kind of leukemia, which is not chronic or acute, and is very rare. It is called juvenile myelomonocytic leukemia. It worsen as slow as chronic leukemia, or as fast as acute leukemia.

There are also two main types of leukemia that adults develop (but I won’t go in depth on these, because Team GEM helps children with leukemia):

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia
Chronic myeloid leukemia

There are many different symptoms for leukemia. Some of them include headaches, frequent infections, weight loss, swelling in the abdomen (this happens because your spleen enlarges), and pain in your bones and joints. Not all symptoms show themselves at once. When you first get chronic leukemia, often you don’t have any symptoms when the doctor diagnoses the disease. In acute leukemia, the symptoms are usually the reason you go to the doctor’s office in the first place. Since acute leukemia worsens quickly, the symptoms show more towards the beginning.

There are three ways that leukemia is diagnosed: physical exam, blood tests, and biopsy. Physical exams are effective because the doctor can examine for swollen spleens, livers, and lymph nodes. Blood tests are useful, because when you have leukemia, your body produces an unusually large amount of white blood cells and the tests can check for this. A biopsy is when a doctor removes a small section of your bone marrow and runs tests on it to see if you have cancer.

Once leukemia is diagnosed, there is a variety of ways to treat it. These include chemotherapy, biological therapy, radiation therapy, and stem cell transplants. Leukemia victims might also undergo surgery to remove a swollen spleen. The point of the initial treatments is to send the victim into remission, and then more treatments are done to keep the disease from coming back. The latter treatments are called maintenance therapy. Many acute leukemia victims are healed. Chronic leukemia victims do not always need immediate attention, if symptoms aren’t showing. Many times, they just need to keep an eye out for symptoms and pursue treatment if it worsens.

Click here for some of the statistics of leukemia.

Bibliography

www.leukemiafoundation.org

www.cancer.org

www.medicinenet.com

www.leukemia-lymphoma.org

www.nlm.nih.gov