What are the options for treating acute lymphocytic leukemia?

What are my options for treating acute lymphocytic leukemia?

I call ALL again, a lightning strike diagnosis.

And what that means is

it happens out of nowhere and then it feels like you lose complete control.

Now, there is

pretty standard therapies for ALL upfront, especially at the very beginning

when we're trying to kill off all those cells and get people into remission.

I do think that it's always important to ask

if your center is participating in any clinical trials for children.

Almost all of those patients

will go on a clinical trial or will be treated per a clinical trial.

That's the same for our young adult patients as well.

As we get older, we have less trials and we have more standard therapies,

but it's always a good thing to ask about what are the options or therapies

now in general and allow.

There will be probably a best option based on your disease, especially,

as I said upfront,

we do this thing called induction.

So I think of treating leukemia as a two step process.

The first step is you have leukemia.

We need to get rid of it. We need to take you to what we call remission.

Now, a remission means your cancer is gone and we can't find any part of it.

But at the same time, your blood counts are normal.

That's remission. Anything other than that is not remission.

We need no cancer.

And your blood count's normal.

That is step one.

Now, you might say, Well, why is there a step two

if we've gotten rid of the cancer?

And the answer is again, we have to get rid of every single cell.

And so we have to get past step one, then we can go to step two,

which is consolidation, and that is we're moving every last cell

in the body, even the ones we can't fight with conventional tests.

So when I talk about that step one, the induction piece,

that is pretty standard a lot of the time and then as we go forward

and we start talking about consolidation and talking about where you are

in your disease process, we talk about is there any cells we find,

What do we need to do? How do we get rid of them forever?