Advances in the clinical staging of chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

摘要

Before publication of this article, clinicians treating chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) experienced a high level of frustration because of the vast heterogeneity in the clinical courses of patients with CLL. After their initial diagnosis, some patients had an extremely aggressive course and would die in about 2 to 3 years despite therapy, whereas some CLL patients would live for years and sometimes die decades later from causes unrelated to CLL.CLL remained a relatively less investigated disease for more than 60 years of the 20th century. The publication of this article in 1975 provided an extremely practical, clinically usable, and reliable method of assigning CLL patients at the time of initial diagnosis into 3 broad prognostic groups: Those with evidence of significant compromise to bone marrow function had the worst prognosis, those who barely fulfilled the minimum diagnostic requirement and had no other stigmata of disease had the best prognosis, and the rest of the patients belonged to an intermediate-prognosis group.