Leukemia

Cancer related to blood cells is called as Leukemia. Under Leukemia condition, bone marrow produces abnormal cancerous blood cells that crowd out the normal and healthy blood cells. Leukemia is of different types based which blood cell type has become cancerous. White blood cells are more to prone to become cancerous than RBCs and platelets. Leukemia can be acute or chronic and Lymphocytic or Myelogenous. It occurs most commonly in adults above 55 years and children younger than 15 years. The treatment methods used depend on the blood cell affected and whether the leukemia is acute or chronic or Lymphocytic or Myelogenous. Chemotherapy is frequently used to treat leukemia.

The acute and chronic leukaemias constitute about 2.5% of all newly diagnosed malignancies and kill over 4000 people/year in the UK. There is little accurate up-to-date data on how the incidence of and mortality from leukaemias vary with socio-economic status in the UK. As per the study by Bhayat et al. (DOI: 10.1186/1471-2407-9-252), A total of 4162 cases of leukaemia were identified, 2314 (56%) of whom were male. The overall incidence of leukaemia was 11.25 per 100 000 person-years. The age and gender distributions of ALL, AML, CLL and CML were similar to UK cancer registry data. The incidence of leukaemias was independent of socio-economic class.