BETA - How is acute myeloid leukemia diagnosed?

So for most patients, they are experiencing some type of symptom that leads their primary care doctor or an urgent care doctor to do a CBC or a complete blood count. That's a way to measure your total white blood cell count, red blood cells, and platelets. Usually, that blood work is markedly abnormal. So patients with AML tend to present with lower than average blood counts. Sometimes it's just one of those cell types. Sometimes it's all three. Occasionally, AML can also present with an elevated white blood cell count, and that's when the disease has started to become more proliferative. The CBC is typically what tips people off that something is definitely abnormal. And then from there, that would get a patient to a hematologist who would then do a bone marrow biopsy, which is how you ultimately arrive at the diagnosis. AML is diagnosed for the majority of patients when we notice abnormalities in their blood counts, so higher low white blood cell count. Patients can be anemic and have low platelet counts, and sometimes we'll see circulating cancer cells or leukemia cells in the blood. And so if we see any of those things for patients that we're concerned for full diagnosis, we'll do a bone marrow biopsy sample to confirm the diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia.