How is CMML staged?
Unlike in solid tumors like lung cancer or prostate cancer, where there's very clear staging, there isn't as well defined staging in most blood cancers. In CMML, we do have a staging system, and it depends entirely on how many of those leukemia blast cells are there. So if you have a low amount of blast cells in both the bone marrow and in the blood from the peripheral blood, we call you CMML one.
If you have an increased amount of blast cells in the bone marrow greater than 10% and an increased blast percentage in the blood from your veins, then that is more of a CMML two.
And so sometimes you'll hear people talk about CMML one and CMML two as different stages. But when I think of staging and when patients think of staging, often they're thinking, do I have stage four disease or stage one disease?
And how we really determine that is based on a bunch of different predictive factors.
And using things called risk scores to say you have these different features of disease, you're low risk, you have these different features, you're high risk, and there's different factors that go into it, including things like what the chromosome abnormalities are, what the different mutations in certain genes are.
If you need red blood cell transfusions, if your white blood cell count is high and how many blasts you have. And we can use a lot of this information to create a score that says you’re high risk, you’re low risk. But I really want to emphasize, too, that even if you're high risk or even if you're low risk, that's not your destiny.
In that therapies may be able to change that to some extent, but every patient is different.
HealthTree • June 5, 2026