Leukamia

Evaluation of the histologic changes of the bone marrow and clinical data of twelve male and two female patients with hairy cell leukamia before treatment. Mean age of the patients was 46 years, time from the onset of symptoms 5.5 months. 13 of the patients were anaemic, showing splenomegaly, 12 suffered from thrombopenia, 9 from granulocytopenia, and 8 from hepatomegaly. In all of the cases, the relative numbers of lymphocytes in the blood had been increased together with various amounts of characteristic hairy cells...

A radioimmunoassay was used to measure concentrations of immunoreactive human calcitonin (HCT) in plasma and leucocytes from patients with various leukaemic and myeloproliferative disorders. Plasma immunoreactive HCT concentrations were increased in 32 out of 33 patients with chronic granulocytic leukaemia (CGL) and in all eight patients with acute myeloid leukamia (AML) at presentation or in relapse. Out of 11 patients with other myeloproliferative disorders, eight had increased plasma immunoreactive HCT concentrations...

The organizational and statistical concept of the cooperative randomized controlled clinical trial on gnotobiotic care and its effect in acute leukamia patients is described. The purpose is the clarification of the concept of the study and the comparison with other studies on the same subject. It is concluded that the value of the results and of the decisions based on them depend mainly on the statistical design, the protocol, and the performance of a study. The performance of a controlled study depends on its organizational details, its monitoring, documentation, and appropriate biometric evaluation...

The dihydrofolate reductase activity has been studied cytochemically in various haematological diseases. The variation between normal controls, Hodgkin's disease, myeloma, polycythaemia vera, chronic lymphocytic leukaemia and chronic myeloid leukamia was not significant, comparing the same type of cells. In acute myeloid leukaemia and acute lymphoblastic leukaemia the blast cells were weakly positive or negative. This finding is very interesting as the blast cells are capable of division. Probably the dihydrofolate reductase appears in the blast cells in some stage of mitosis...

A cytochemical study of a case of acute myelomonocytic leukaemia, which arose after radiation therapy and polychemotherapy for Hodgkin's disease, is presented. The distribution of the DNA content of the circulating blood cells appears to be different from the unimodal diploid distribution reported in the literature for acute myelomonocytic leukamias not associated with therapy. This finding seems to strengthen the hypothesis, already put forward by Marinone et al. (1979), that a particular pattern of DNA content distribution could be characteristic of leukaemias linked to chemotherapy and radiotherapy...