What are blasts and how are they measured? What happens if my blasts are not low enough after treatment?

What are BLASTS and how are they measured? BLASTS are immature cells that infiltrate the bone marrow in patients with leukemia, AML, MDS, ALL, all of these have the potential for immature cells that appear and persist and we can detect them under a microscope. BLASTS can be quantified in several different ways. They can be simply counted based on how many you see under a microscope on a bone marrow biopsy specimen. There are stains that pathologists can use that will highlight BLASTS in the bone marrow and that's another way that we can account for them. Then there's a fancy way called flow cytometry where we use certain antibodies to different proteins on the surface of the BLASTS and that can also be a way that we can count how many BLASTS a patient's bone marrow has. Patients with these diseases have increased numbers of BLASTS in the bone marrow. We usually say that's anything greater than 5% would be increased. And how do BLASTS go down? With effective treatment is how we get BLASTS to decrease. What happens if my BLASTS are not low enough after treatment? That just depends on every treatment. It's always different. There are some treatments that work really quickly and we expect the BLASTS percentage to decrease very rapidly. And other treatments, they take longer, maybe even sometimes months for the BLASTS percentage to go down. So it really just depends on the type of treatment. If the BLASTS haven't gone to a level that your doctor wanted them to go to or expected them to go to, then that might mean that the treatment didn't work or stopped working. And so it may be that that would be a situation in which you would talk to your doctor about switching to a different therapy perhaps. So that would be a conversation you need to have with your physician.