Treatment outcome in older patients with childhood acute myeloid leukemia
Cancer, 06/08/2012
Rubnitz JE et al. – The survival rate for older children with AML has improved on the results of a recent trial and is now similar to that of younger patients. However, deaths from toxicity remain a significant problem for patients in the older age group.
Methods- Clinical outcome and causes of treatment failure of 351 patients enrolled on 3 consecutive protocols for childhood AML between 1991 and 2008 were analyzed according to age and protocol.
- The more recent protocol (AML02) produced improved outcomes for patients aged 10 years to 21 years compared with 2 earlier studies (AML91 and AML97), with 3-year rates of event-free survival (EFS), overall survival (OS), and cumulative incidence of refractory leukemia or recurrence (CIR) for this group being similar to those of patients aged birth to 9 years: EFS: 58.3% ± 5.4% versus 66.6% ± 4.9% (P = .20); OS: 68.9% ± 5.1% versus 75.1% ± 4.5% (P = .36); and CIR: 21.9% ± 4.4% versus 25.3% ± 4.2% (P = .59).
- The EFS and OS estimates for patients aged 10 to 15 years overlapped those for patients aged 16 to 21 years.
- However, the cumulative incidence of toxic death was significantly higher for patients aged 10 to 21 years compared with younger patients (13.2% ± 3.6% vs 4.5% ± 2.0%; P = .028).
