BETA - How do I know the stage of my acute myeloid leukemia?

How do I know the stage of my AML? AML is not staged like other cancers. Other cancers have this staging system, stage one, two, three, four, based on where the cancer is in the body. AML does not have a stage like that, and that is in part because the cancer cells are all over the blood. We don't do scans, for instance, to see where the cancer is in acute myeloid leukemia. The way that we stage our patients is by risk groups. We have three different established risk groups. They're known as favorable risk, intermediate risk, and adverse or poor risk. And they're based on the chromosomal analysis and abnormalities that are present from a chromosome or karyotype test that are done as a standard test for all newly diagnosed acute myeloid leukemia patients and the mutations that are present. Acute myeloid leukemia doesn't have stages per se because it's a cancer of the blood, but there are certainly groupings of patients which help us understand how best to treat people. So for AML, we have what's called risk groups. That also comes from your leukemia net. So we have the good risk group. So these are patients who have certain features that tell us they're going to be sensitive to chemotherapy alone, meaning that we could give them chemo and potentially cure them with the right mix of treatment. Then there's patients who are in what we call the adverse risk group. I think it's a little bit unfair to call them adverse because no one wants to hear that that's the group they fall into, but it helps us know that we need to respect that their disease may be a little bit more difficult to manage with chemotherapy alone. So for those patients who are in the adverse risk group, they certainly would need a stem cell transplant to keep their leukemia away once we're able to get the leukemia to go away in the first place. And then there's a big group. Most patients fall into that middle group, which is the intermediate risk group, where depending on how sort of challenging or easy it might be for them to enter a remission and how deep that remission goes, we can determine whether a transplant will be required to keep the leukemia away or whether they might have a high chance of being cured with just a few more rounds of what we call consolidative chemotherapy. So it's not stages, it's risk groups, but it's absolutely important to have the disease as defined characteristically as possible in the beginning so we know what therapies to provide going forward.