Chronic granulocytic leukemia in blastic crisis. Prognostic factors.

Thirty-nine patients with chronic granulocytic leukemia (CGL) in blastic crisis (BC) were studied from 1981 to 1988 at the Hematology Service of the General Hospital of Mexico. The patients were from 18 to 80 years old. Twenty-one patients (54%) were in lymphatic BC and 18 patients (46%) corresponded to BC myeloid. All the patients were treated with different chemotherapy schedules. Only three patients in lymphoid BC and two in myeloid BC achieved complete remission. The longest remission time was 24 weeks and the longest survival 36 weeks. The clinical and laboratory features, such as age, anemia, bleeding, fever, bone pain, adenopathy, splenomegaly, hepatomegaly, extramedullary infiltration, leukocyte count, hemoglobin, platelets, blast cells, in peripheral blood and bone marrow, basophils, and morphology and cytochemistry stains characteristic in bone marrow, were compared between the two groups of patients. None of the clinical and laboratory findings studied were significantly different between the two types of BC, except the evolution time from the diagnosis to the BC, which was more than than two years for most of the patients in lymphoid BC. We also studied the prognosis factors related to survival time. There were no clinical or laboratory differences among the patients who survived more than or less than 14 weeks.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)