Childhood leukaemia: towards improved tailored therapy.

摘要

In this issue of The Lancet Oncology, Moorman and colleagues1 describethe association between cytogenetic abnormalities and risk of relapse in childhood acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL). Numerous studies have addressed this issue but are usually limited because they analyse one or few genetic abnormalities or only selected subsets of patients with ALL. By contrast, this study analyses a large number of recurrent abnormalities in more than 1700 patients who were uniformly treated and have a long follow-up. Two abnormalities were associated with a favourable outcome (ETV6-RUNX1 and high hyperdiploidy) and four with a worse outcome (intrachromosomal amplification of chromosome 21 [iAMP21], t(9;22), loss of chromosome 13q, and abnormalities of chromosome 17p).