Word: leukemias
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...Kill. When it came to pin pointing the causes of leukemia, the researchers were still at a loss. But there was no doubt about effects. The National Cancer Institute's Dr. C. Gordon Zubrod reported that by the time a leukemia patient is ill enough for his disease to be diagnosed, he usually has 1012 (or 1 trillion) leukemic cells in his blood. His physician must try to kill all these abnormal cells without killing or damaging too many of the normal cells. In the trade, said Dr. Zu brod, each factor of ten in that trillion cells...
...Manhattan's Sloan-Kettering Institute introduced another anti-leukemia drug, 6-mercaptopurine. Use of the two drugs in succession, along with prednisone (a cortisone-type hormone) raised the kill to three to five logs. Since 1963, with half a dozen new anti-leukemia drugs available for concurrent or consecutive use, the cell kill achieved in the best cancer centers has reached ten logs, reducing the leukemic-cell count...
...even these few cells can multiply and cause relapses, the obvious objective is a twelve-log kill-the elimination of every last leukemic cell. And the ultracautious Dr. Zubrod made what is, for him, a wildly optimistic statement: "I believe that in about 25% of patients with acute lymphocytic leukemia now starting treatment, the cell kill is approaching twelve logs...
Long Survivals. Despite remaining difficulties, the outlook for victims of acute lymphocytic leukemia continues to improve. Since 1964, the proportion of patients who gain complete if temporary remissions as a result of intensive treatment has gone up from 50% to 90%, said Dr. Zubrod, and the median survival time has stretched from 19 months to three years or more. A few patients have done still better, reported Sloan-Kettering's Dr. Joseph H. Burchenal. He knows of 87 children and 16 adults who are alive five years after first diagnosis, with no detectable disease. Indeed, 29 of them have...
Admittedly, said Dr. Burchenal, these cases represent only a fraction of 1% of the world's leukemia toll (the U.S. annually records about 18,000 new leukemia cases-about 3,000 children), and virtually all got intensive treatment in one of the few medical centers specializing in leukemia. But this does not mean that such care is limited to children living close to those centers. Dr. Zubrod urged his physician listeners to refer patients with suspected leukemia to the centers where, if the diagnosis is confirmed, they can be treated by a team of experts until the leukemic cell...