How are acute leukemias treated?
Treatment of the acute leukaemias differs from treatment of other malignancies in that we utilise similar chemotherapeutic agents of chemotherapy; standard chemotherapies, but we administer it for a long period of time. The terms that must be reviewed when treating patients or discussing treatment of patients with leukaemias, or specifically acute leukaemias, are the terms induction, consolidation and maintenance. I think it is important to mention that we initially treat patients with acute leukaemia to induce them into a remission, so that refers to the induction phase which is usually a very aggressive course of treatment that necessitates admission to the hospital for anywhere between 10 to 30 days for the initial induction phase. That's followed, if there is a remission, with several series of consolidative chemotherapy which is less aggressive but occurs more often over a period of approximately three to six months, and is followed subsequently by a maintenance phase of chemotherapy or treatment to prevent the relapse of this type of disease. So, as opposed to other malignancies where we treat, as a single type of treatment, just repeated cycles of chemotherapy that you may or may not be familiar with, leukaemias require a very ordered type of treatment where you start aggressively. You move down aggression a little bit in terms of the consolidative therapies, but provide this chemotherapy over a long period of time. Ultimately, it goes to taking as much time as necessary to destroy the abnormal stem cells that are in the bone marrow.
