What Is the Optimal Therapy for Childhood AML?
The past 30 years have seen tremendous advances in the treatment of pediatric leukemia. What was once an invariably fatal diagnosis is now quite curable in close to 80% of cases. Unfortunately for children with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML), most of these developments have been in the treatment of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL); even today, nearly half of all children diagnosed with AML will die of the disease. In their excellent and comprehensive article, Loeb and Arceci review the current state of therapies for pediatric AML throughout the world, summarizing the approaches taken by the various major cooperative groups. In essence, these strategies have involved the intensification of either the dosages or timing of the few chemotherapeutic agents active against AML. Distinct Disease Entities Several themes running through the review are worth emphasizing. First, it has become increasingly clear that, despite their common CD34-positive hematopoietic stem cell origin, AML and AL
