How does a treatment differ between adults and children with AML? The way that treatment goes for pediatric AML is that it always starts with very intensive chemotherapy. The good thing about children is that children are generally able to tolerate much higher doses of chemotherapy than adults can. Very high doses of chemotherapy will kill the leukemia cells. What we generally start with is one or two rounds of what's called induction chemotherapy. That's usually two or three agents at very high doses to kill all the leukemia cells. By the end of those several days of chemotherapy for each cycle, your blood counts will all drop to very, very low levels if they weren't there already. Then over the next several weeks, your blood counts slowly recover and then you repeat. If someone needs a bone marrow transplant based upon the risk category of their AML, then they can proceed to bone marrow transplant after that. This is very different from adult AML because adults are not able to tolerate the doses of chemotherapy that children are able to tolerate. Remember I said that adult AML is really more and more common the older the person gets. A very frail elderly person may not be able to tolerate such intensive chemotherapy. Depending on the age of the adult and depending on the exact type of leukemia they have, that will determine the treatment course, the types and rounds of chemotherapy and whether or not they go to bone marrow transplant. It's different from children in that sense. Are the therapies between adults versus children with AML different in the drugs used or in the strength of the drugs used? When it comes to the difference between pediatric treatment and adult treatment, the drugs that are chosen are different depending on the scenario of how old the adult is and what type of AML they have. We're not just talking about doses. We're also talking about which drugs are chosen.
HealthTree • January 5, 2023