Leukemia: What causes leukemia? | Norton Cancer Institute

Don A. Stevens, M.D., Medical Oncologist at Norton Healthcare, explains what causes leukemia.

The vast majority of patients that get leukemia, the actual cause is unknown. We do understand what's broken, it's a very common question, as you might imagine. We do understand what breaks but we don't know why it breaks.

It's as if you took your car in and they said you know, the fuel pump is broken and you say, but why did the fuel pump break? You don't know and the mechanic says I don’t know either.


We now know, for example, many different genetic abnormalities and by genetic abnormalities, I don't mean genetic abnormalities that you inherit from your mom and dad or that you pass to your children. These are genetic abnormalities of the cancer cell of the leukemia cell. So, we've been able to find these differences that lead to different leukemias so, we know the difference between a functioning fuel pump and a bad fuel pump but we don't know why it broke.


We do know some things are exposures to hydrocarbons like fuels and exposure to radiation. But again, the majority of the patients that we see don't have that sort of history. We know we can do molecular tests, we can say these are the characteristics of your leukemia, this is why it's behaving this way and we've even gotten to the point where we can subdivide the acute leukemias into those that we regard as relatively good risk and bad risk. The bad risk ones are the ones that were going to want to transplant sooner rather than later but we still don't know why. We know the "what" but we don't know the "why".

Learn more about leukemia https://www.nortonhealthcare.com/Leukemia

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