What is New for Pre Leukemia Treatment
When a gentle form of chemotherapy using decitabine is used a new study showed this to e very beneficial to patients with pre leukemia. Pre leukemia, which is now more commonly known as Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS) only recently was acknowledged as being a legitimate form of cancer even though it nearly always has led to the development of leukemia.
The study took an comprehensive look at pre leukemia and the implications on the body and the findings was published in the journal for the American Cancer Society.
New Research Revealed
According to researchers, an estimated 45 percent of patients living with pre leukemia and relapse respond to a second course of treatment, but don’t receive the quality and duration in the second response that they did in their initial rounds of chemotherapy. This recent finding leads researchers to believe that longer initial treatments rather than frequent rounds of therapy are more beneficial.
Found in this study was out of 22 patients 10 had any sort of response that were treated with about three courses of decitabine. Three of the patients involved are said to have had a partial or complete response in all three of their cell lines and seven other patients experienced hematologic improvements and an at least 50 percent drop in their transfusion requirements. The average overall rate of survival was reported to be 28 months and decitabine-retreated people had about a 13 month survival rate thereafter.
Decitabine retreatment in 12 of the patients not achieving a second response either had no effect or suppressed the abnormal cells without bone marrow repopulation with the normal cells. Four of 12 patients, went from living with pre leukemia to living with acute leukemia.
All in all, the authors believe the best type of treatment for pre leukemia patients is getting longer chemotherapy rounds initially and then a shorter round of maintenance.
What is Pre Leukemia?
A disease that affects bone marrow is pre leukemia and causes an increased number of dysfunctional red and white blood cells. The cells usually blast and develop from the stem cells while spreading in the blood stream and killing off the normal blood cells. As a result of this abnormal production of blood cells, less red blood cells are formed in order to circulate and carry to the body oxygen.
Pre leukemia frequently effects people in the 50s, and although therapy is offered, it is still hard for researchers to find a cure. In most cases, patients who have pre leukemia develop blood cell cancer, which is better known as leukemia. As shown in this study, these patients benefit most from this new DNA hypomethylating agent, dectabine,
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Tags: Cancer, leukemia, pre leukemia, Pre Leukemia Treatment