BETA - What are my options for treating acute myeloid leukemia?

What are my options for treating AML? So treatments for AML is ever-changing. With it being a blood cancer, you know, we have to give chemotherapy in order to penetrate the bone marrow and kill the cancer at the source, which is deep in our marrow. You know, in rarer forms of acute myeloid leukemia, there can be radiation, but we hardly use that. But most often we'll give chemotherapy, and it's just determination of how intense that chemotherapy will be. or what we call induction chemotherapy is combinations of high-powered chemo most often given in the hospital, resulting in longer hospital stays. And what we're trying to do with induction is induce a remission. And unfortunately for patients, that's not the end of their chemo journey. Then we further make that remission stronger by giving what we like to be outpatient chemotherapies with the ultimate goal in most patients of getting to what we call an allogeneic stem cell transplant or a bone marrow transplant. And what that entails is getting more chemotherapy and then following up that chemotherapy with donated stem cells that don't have these mutations and don't have these cancerous characteristics and getting them infused back into someone's body so that those unmutated, uncancerous stem cells can then grow healthy cells in someone's body. There's also lower intensity chemotherapy that is becoming more and more prevalent in the management of acute myeloid leukemia. And that is something that used to be used primarily in the elderly and what we would call unfit. But now we're starting to use it more and more in younger patients because it works so well. So when it comes to treatment, the options that patients have depends a lot on their age and it depends a lot on their personal fitness, their personal health history, and the features of their particular acute myeloid leukemia. To define the full landscape of treatments for AML, I think we would have to walk through the different risk groups, the good, the in the middle, and the adverse risk groups. But for most young patients, and young is relative, it depends on the person, but for most young patients there are intensive chemotherapy. When we say intensive, we mean chemotherapies which might need to be given in the hospital and do have some side effects which can be tough, like losing your hair or having lower blood counts for a time. For our older patients, that's where a lot of the revolution in AML has occurred in the last decade where we have gentler chemotherapy regimens that are combined with pill chemos that can be administered to people without having to be in the hospital or without the profundity of side effects that the more intense chemotherapy can offer. But as a transplanter, we are always trying to find ways for those that need a transplant to get them to a transplant safely and fit enough to manage that course. And so these gentler treatments have also opened up a lot of doors for us to be able to cure more patients actually, because before when you're an older person with AML, we might be able to manage, but to cure was a real challenge. But now with the advancements in stem cell transplant and the advancements in our chemotherapies before it, we've come such a long way and we can usually find a way forward for most patients. So oral chemotherapies have made a big difference. And to be honest with you, whether these agents that are the oral chemos were, even if they were infusional, they would be revolutionary. So the fact that we are able to administer these agents by pill form is just incredibly helpful. The reality though is that some pills could be just as tough as some infusions. So monitoring patients on these drugs is very important, but it's certainly been a big game changer. So the FLT3 inhibitors, which are pills, benetoclax, which has just been a huge win for many disease types. And I'm grateful that it came along and that we're learning so much more about it and how to use it in combination with other things.