BETA - What are the risk factors for developing acute myeloid leukemia?

What are the risk factors for developing AML? Unlike other cancers, there are fewer risk factors for AML. The main risk factors for AML are receiving chemotherapy or radiation therapy for other cancers. There is an irony that if you are treated with chemotherapy for other cancers, that can increase the risk of you developing an acute leukemia. That is probably the biggest risk factor that we see in our clinic. Patients who have other bone marrow cancers that are not acute myeloid leukemia but have a risk of developing into acute myeloid leukemia such as myelodysplastic syndrome or MDS or other types of myeloproliferative neoplasms are also risk factors for developing acute myeloid leukemia. And then there are some other rare environmental toxins like benzene, which is not as common now that high exposure levels can increase the risk of developing acute leukemia. And then rarely there are familial versions of acute leukemia whereby people are born with mutations or abnormalities that increase their risk of developing an acute myeloid leukemia. Those are really rare, although we're learning more and more about those types of mutations and inherited predispositions that I think the prevalence is probably higher than we think but still relatively rare in the grand scheme of risk factors for acute leukemia. Most of these patients unfortunately develop this cancer without any risk factor. There's nothing they could have done to cause it or prevent it. Smoking and other behavioral risks are less sort of associated with acute leukemia compared with other cancers. So the main risk factors would include exposure to radiation and this comes from data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also people who have had therapeutic radiation. Think about a man who has received radiation for prostate cancer. There's a lot of marrow in the pelvis and that radiation can do damage to that marrow and then lead to the development of leukemia many years later. Similarly with certain chemotherapy drugs, there's a drug called cyclophosphamide that is used in curative regimens for breast cancer, for lymphoma, and it can also cause damage to these early blood cells and manifest in leukemia years later. Others would include atoposide, again another drug used to treat testicular cancer, highly curable, lymphoma. So certain exposures such as this, chemical exposures as well, generally industrial solvents, things like benzene and toluene. So these are the things that can lead to leukemia. There are certain inherited conditions that can also do this. It's rare, but there's a syndrome called Lee-Fraumeni where there's damage to one of the tumor suppressor genes in our body that can lead to the development of leukemia. Also other genetic predispositions like Fanconi's anemia, but these are relatively rare. Generally speaking, AML is not an inherited disorder.