What are the risk factors for developing acute lymphocytic leukemia?
We don't know of any environmental or exposure risk for ALL.
There have been some things that people have looked into, but nothing has really panned out in terms of looking at that.
Now, we do know that ALL is a genetic disease, and that is just for what it is.
We're making the wrong cell. We're not making a normal white blood cell. We're making a cancer cell.
And what that means is something has to be wrong with the blueprint.
Our DNA now, if you would have asked me ten years ago, was this an inherited disease, I would have told you.
No, I don't think so. We haven't found that yet.
Now, what we have found in the last 5 to 10 years is that there is a subset, a small proportion of these people, and mainly this is the childhood disease where it is inherited.
There are mutations that we see that run in families.
However, it's not like having blond hair and blue eyes. It's not that linear.
In fact, you can have some of these mutations and nothing will ever happen.
Having said that, we do know that if you accumulate several such mutations, it does put you at increased risk for ALL, especially childhood ALL.
And so there is ongoing work right now in terms of both better predicting, but also maybe even trying to figure out ways to avoid ALL in that population.
Other areas that we know that we see more ALL are diseases such as Down syndrome and other inherited conditions.
They do have a higher predisposition to ALL.
Having said that, again, no link is just not 1 to 1.
And there are probably other factors going into having ALL.
