Leukemia: What is the prognosis for patients? | Norton Cancer Institute

Don A. Stevens, M.D., Medical Oncologist at Norton Healthcare, explains what leukemia is and the general prognosis for leukemia patients.

The prognosis is much, much better as you might imagine for most of the chronic conditions than the acute ones. In the terms of the chronic myelogenous leukemia, just to use that an example of chronic leukemia, our initial ability to control that disease was measured at about three and a half years or so. That meant that 50 percent of the patients would have succumbed to the illness within 42 months approximately.

We now have medicines where we're keeping the vast, vast majority of people alive by taking a pill. I mean, it is not intravenous chemotherapy, it is a targeted medicine. We have 3 different ones of these that specifically target again the molecular problem that is inside the bad cell and by doing that patients have been able to avoid bone marrow transplantation and avoid all of the consequences, those later consequences of the acute leukemias.

The progress in the acute leukemias has not yet been so dramatic but we still had many new medicines that are being examined in that disease and we are making progress. Part of that progress has to do with deciding how the treat each of these sub-types of acute leukemias.

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

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