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Lymphoma News Weekly Digest II

Lymphocyte Count Found To Be A Predictor Of Survival For Young Patients With Leukemia:  A review of young leukemia patients over the past decade  at the Children’s Cancer Hospital at M. D. Anderson has shown that the absolute lymphocyte count (ALC), a measure of normal immune cells found on every complete blood count report, is a powerful predictor of survival for young patients with leukemia. The results from the study showed that AML patients who had a low lymphocyte count on day 15 of treatment had a five-year overall survival chance of only 28 percent. However, patients with higher lymphocytes on day 15 had a much better overall survival rate of 85 percent.

Vaccine Slows Recurrence in Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma:  In patients with follicular non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the vaccine — dubbed BiovaxID — nearly doubled the time before the disease recurred, compared with a control drug, according to Stephen Schuster, M.D., of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia. After a median follow-up up of 56 months, the median time to relapse for patients getting the vaccine was 44.2 months, compared with 30.6 for those in the control group. The difference was significant at P=0.045 and yielded a hazard ratio of 1.6, the researchers found.

Exposure to formaldehyde may be linked to blood and lymphatic cancers, particularly myeloid leukemia, researchers have found: In an extended analysis of workers exposed to formaldehyde during their careers, the agent was associated with a 37% increased risk of death from such cancers in those with the highest exposures according to Laura E. Beane Freeman, Ph.D., of the National Cancer Institute.  The overall patterns They said it’s not possible to identify the mechanism by which formaldehyde may induce leukemia, but agents known to cause leukemia also cause chromosomal aberrations in peripheral blood cells, according to research by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

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