Possible in utero effects of maternal smoking on hemopoietic cancer in the offspring have been addressed previously, although the results are inconclusive. In this investigation, we take advantage of population-based registers in Sweden to examine maternal smoking during pregnancy and childhood risk of leukemia and lymphoma. Prospective data were available from 1,440,542 Swedish children born b...

Six cases of acute leukemia that underwent lineage switch from acute lymphocytic leukemia to acute myelogenous leukemia are reported. The mean age of the patients was 24 years, time to conversion was 36 months, and survival after conversion was only 3 months. Of the three cases which showed abnormal metaphases at both diagnosis and conversion, two (cases 2, 5) showed related cytogenetic abnorma...

Arsenic trioxide inhibits growth and promotes apoptosis in many different cancer cell lines. The National Cancer Institute is working cooperatively with research centers across the U.S. to evaluate its clinical activity in hematologic malignancies, such as acute promyelocytic leukemia, acute myeloid leukemia, acute lymphocytic leukemia, chronic myelogenous leukemia, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Hodg...

Peripheral mononuclear cells from adult T cell leukemia (ATL) patients were analyzed in comparison with other types of leukemia cells, for the expression of transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-beta) mRNA, for the presence of TGF-beta activity (colony stimulating activity for normal rat kidney fibroblasts [NRK]) in conditioned medium and for their susceptibility to exogenous TGF-beta. Highly el...

Resistance to multiple chemotherapeutic agents has been related to the production of P-glycoprotein, a trans-membrane drug efflux pump that is encoded by the multidrug resistance (MDR) gene mdrl. To investigate whether mdrl could be involved in clinical resistance to chemotherapy in acute leukemias, we have analyzed retrospectively the RNA from adult acute leukemia cells by slot-blot hybridizat...

Genome sequencing is revealing a vast mutational landscape in leukemia, offering new opportunities for treatment with targeted therapy. Here, we identify two patients with acute myelogenous leukemia and B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia whose tumors harbor point mutations in the ALK kinase. The mutations reside in the extracellular domain of ALK and are potently transforming in cytokine-indep...

AML1 is a transcription factor that is essential for normal hematopoietic development. It is the most frequent target for translocations in acute leukemia. Recently, fluorescence in situ hybridization was used to identify a novel syndrome of radiation-associated secondary acute myelogenous leukemia that had AML1 translocations. Using polymerase chain reaction, the AML1 fusion transcript was iso...

Refractory and relapsed disease occurs in most acute myelogenous leukemia patients. Salvage chemotherapy offers a 30-70% chance of a second complete remission. Unfortunately, this second remission is usually short lived and salvage chemotherapy is rarely curative. Allogeneic bone marrow transplant, either human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-sibling matched or matched unrelated donor, is the only trea...