For young leukemia patients lucky enough to have a sibling with the same tissue type, a bone marrow transplant may be the best option if the disease reappears after treatment, researchers said in a study to be published Thursday.
The study of 916 cases analyzed by a team lead by Dr John Barrett of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute will appear in the New England Journal of Medicine.Initial treatment with chemotherapy usually cures the majority of sufferers, but in about one-quarter of the children, the disease reappears in the bone marrow, where blood cells are made.
Symptoms of the deadly disease usually disappear after another round of chemotherapy, but the cancer often reappears to eventually kill all but 10 to 20 percent of those patients within five years.
The investigators found that among children suffering a recurrence of leukemia after a period of five years, the survival rate rose to 40 percent for the 376 children who got a bone marrow transplant from a brother or sister. Only 17 percent for 540 youngsters who received chemotherapy survived after the cancer returned.
Barrett and his colleagues studied youngsters suffering from acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the most common form of leukemia among children, whose defective, infection-fighting white blood cells crowd out healthy cells. The study did not examine bone marrow transplants from non-related donors.