How quickly does AML progress? Once it's diagnosed, it can progress very fast within days and weeks and months. However, the initial event that makes the very first cell malignant can happen years earlier. We know this from chemical exposure, especially benzene, and of course from nuclear accidents or from Hiroshima, Nagasaki. People have plotted the time from these events to the occurrence of leukemia. So I would say the minimal time period would be one year, and it can be maybe up to eight or 10 years. The upper limit is not so clear. But it takes at least one year for this one single cell to grow up into an acute leukemia. So the numbers in acute leukemias are mind-boggling. An acute leukemia can be diagnosed when we have 10 to the 12th, 10 to the 12th, leukemic cells in the body. We don't see it at 10 to the 8th or 10 to the 9th. That would not be recognizable by normal blood counts or even by, well, one would not use molecular techniques necessarily just to screen the entire population. So the number at diagnosis, magic number, is 10 to the 12th. And now we have to eliminate all of these cells or close to all of these cells to cure patients. We'll talk about that. I think one of the issues is that the disease comes on quickly. So even if a person is diligent about seeing their primary care physician on a yearly basis and they're doing routine blood work, a lot can happen in a year. And it doesn't take very long for the disease to progress from undetectable to fulminant disease. And so many times people will come in because they're bleeding or because they have an infection. And that's usually what brings people to medical attention.
HealthTree • May 14, 2022
