Letter to the editor in response to 'Prospective bone ultrasound patterns during childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia' by Mussa et al.

摘要

With interest, we have read the recent paper of Mussa et al. [1]. They longitudinally investigated the skeletal modifications in children, from diagnosis to the end of therapy for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). The authors advocate the very important issue that bone morbidity during ALL treatment is associated with prominent bone loss in the first months. These results confirm previous reports by our group (van der Sluis et al. and Lequin et al.), using both conventional dual energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA) [2] and tibial quantitative ultrasound (QUS) [3] in patients treated according to the Dutch Childhood Oncology Group (DCOG)-ALL9 protocol [4]. Early severe bone loss may therefore indeed serve as a predictor of in-treatment skeletal complications.