What is AML in children? So acute myeloid leukemia in children is when some of the blood cells in the body, the myeloid cells, which is one of the type of cells that makes up your immune system, starts making too many of themselves and they grow and grow and grow. But unlike a tumor that occupies one space and gets bigger, since the blood cells are all over your body and all in your bones, the leukemia is all over your body. So these cells grow and grow and grow and there's far too many of them and it's completely uncontrolled and so they can take over the body and lead to the inability of your body to make proper blood cells so people get anemia, people get low platelets, and it can be a fatal condition. So kids make up the vast minority of AML cases. It's primarily a disease of older adults. Through life, as you get older and older, the risk of AML increases over time. In pediatrics, there are far fewer. But in leukemias, there's two major types of leukemia, ALL and AML, and ALL is far more common in children, but AML does exist in children too. The risk is higher for teenagers than for young children.