Infant Lymphoblastic Leukemia: A Single Centers 10 Year Experience

Abstract

Infant acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a rare disease and consists of 4-5% of all childhood ALL. Despite improved survival rates in childhood ALL, infants with ALL have a worse prognosis. We aimed to evaluate the clinical features and treatment outcomes of our patients diagnosed with infant ALL at Hacettepe University, Pediatric Hematology Department between 1 January 2008 and 1 January 2018 retrospectively. There were 13 patients with a median age of 7 months. Three of the patients were triplets born from a spontaneous monozygotic triplet pregnancy. Relapse were observed in 4 patients. Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) was performed for five patients. Relapse after HSCT was observed in 3 patients. After a median follow-up period of 18 months, 6 patients (45%) (3 after HSCT and 3 who only received chemotherapy) were alive and in remission. Prognosis of infant ALL is poor in that only half of the patients survive. Our results suggest that bone marrow transplantation seems to be a good and efficient choice of treatment for selected patients. However, there is still a big issue to decide which patient should undergo transplantation and more studies are needed to reevaluate the eligibility criteria for HSCT in this group of patients.