What is acute myeloid leukemia (AML)?

What is acute myeloid leukemia? In explaining AML to a patient or their family, I like to think of how the blood factory makes blood. And the blood factory, some people may recall, is in your hips. And inside your hips is like a sponge. All those nooks and crannies of the sponge is where your blood would be made. And you have three main types of blood cells. You have platelets to help the blood clot. You have red blood cells to carry oxygen. And you have white blood cells to fight off infections. There's lots of different types of infections, so you have lots of different types of white blood cells. When one type starts growing out of control, that's going to make a blood cancer. That could be a myeloma, a lymphoma, or leukemia. So AML refers to a specific white blood cell that has started to grow out of control and become immortal. Acute myeloid leukemia is a bone marrow cancer. And basically what happens is the bone marrow gets a bad signal. And it starts to make too many early cells, and they're immature. They don't know how to grow up. And sometimes it'll get a signal to increase those cells in abundance or proliferate them. And that obviously gets into the bloodstream. So the bone marrow makes the blood. And so leukemia is a cancer of the blood. And it's a significant cancer that needs treatment. Otherwise it will take a person's life. To think about acute myeloid leukemia, we really need to think about how normal blood cells are produced. And normally what happens is we have a neat and orderly program in our bone marrow to make all of the different types of blood cells. So there are white cells that fight infection, red blood cells that carry oxygen through the body, and platelets that help blood clot. So what happens under normal circumstances is that there's a very early type of blood cell called a blast. And that blast should mature into a good infection fighting cell called a neutrophil. So what happens in acute myeloid leukemia is that that blast gets stuck at this very immature stage and then loses the ability to mature. And then soon it's just growing out of control, filling up the bone marrow, and stopping the production of normal blood cells.