INTRODUCTION Osteoporosis in children is rare and usually secondary to an underlying disease process whose diagnosis may be difficult to detect. Etiological factors responsible for osteoporosis secondary to chronic illness include immobility, pubertal delay and other hormonal disturbances. Rarely, it can be a manifestation of acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Most of the reported bone fracture inci...

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia is the most common malignancy in pediatric patients; its diagnosis is usually easy to establish as malignant lymphoblasts invade the bone marrow and peripheral blood. Some acute lymphoblastic leukemia patients may initially present with pancytopenia and a hypoplastic bone marrow leading to the initial diagnosis of aplastic anemia. In most of these patients clinical ...

A case of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, associated with cells resembling Gaucher cells in the bone marrow, is reported. The patient had no evidence of inherited Gaucher's disease and the ultrastructural appearance of the cells was consistent with pseudo-Gaucher cells described in other haematological diseases. This is the first report of these cells in association with acute lymphoblastic leuk...

Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS) is rarely reported in children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia and may be difficult to differentiate from vincristine induced neuropathy. We report two children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia on induction chemotherapy who developed GBS. The diagnostic issues and potential pathogenic mechanisms underlying GBS in pediatric patients with ALL are discussed.

A 41 year old female developed reactive haemophagocytic histiocytosis secondary to herpes simplex infection, during remission induction for acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. She recovered fully with acyclovir and supportive treatment. Previous publications on the association between acute lymphoblastic leukaemia and haemophagocytic syndrome are reviewed, and the nature of the haemophagocytic disor...

Children with ataxia telangiectasia have a high probability of developing acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, and have increased sensitivity to chemotherapy and irradiation. We report a 51/2 year old boy who had undiagnosed ataxia telangiectasia when he presented with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. He subsequently developed a chemoradiation induced leukoencephalopathy after conventional central nerv...

Lymphocyte-dependent antibodies (LDA's) directed against antigenic determinants present on lymphoblastoid cell lines as well as human leukemia blast cells were demonstrated in heterologous antisera obtained by immunizing rabbits with a membrane fraction from RPMI-4265 (a lymphoblastoid cell line derived from a patient with chronic myelogenous leukemia). LDA was present at high titers against B-...

BACKGROUND The translocation t(1;19)(q23;p13), which results in the TCF3-PBX1 chimeric gene, is one of the most frequent rearrangements observed in B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. It appears in both adult and pediatric patients with B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia at an overall frequency of 3 to 5%. Most cases of pre-B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia carrying the translocation t(1;19...

Recurrent deletions of the long arm of chromosome 5 were detected in 23/200 cases of T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Genomic studies identified two types of deletions: interstitial and terminal. Interstitial 5q deletions, found in five cases, were present in both adults and children with a female predominance (chi-square, P=0.012). Interestingly, these cases resembled immature/early T-cell...

BACKGROUND The t(9;22) and t(4;11) chromosomal translocations, which generate the BCR-ABL and MLL-AF4 fusion genes, define high-risk subtypes of acute lymphoblastic leukemia in adults. However, the prognostic impact of other rarer fusion genes is less well established in adult acute lymphoblastic leukemia than in the childhood form. DESIGN AND METHODS In the context of the German Multicenter ...