Chronic lymphocytic leukemia and prognostic factors.

BACKGROUND

The clinical course of individual chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is highly variable and clinical staging systems do not help us to predict if and at what rate there will be disease progression in an individual patient diagnosed with early stage disease. Recently, several important observations related to other prognostic factors including lymphocyte doubling time (LDT), β2-microglobulin (β2-MG), and percent of smudge cell in peripheral blood smears, cytogenetic and molecular analysis have been made. The aim of this study was to evaluate a range of prognostic factors in our CLL patients.

DESIGN AND METHODS

Seventy patients with CLL were enrolled. Prognostic factors of disease including Binet staging, LDT, β2-MG, ESR, LDH, percent of smudge cell in peripheral blood smear, absolute lymphocyte count, and conventional cytogenetic (CC) analysis were evaluated at diagnosis, and the patients were followed up to determine their outcome. We compared factors with each other and with Binet staging and prognosis.

RESULTS

Enrolled patients aged 37-85 years at diagnosis or during follow up. There was no relationship between serum LDH level (P=0.3), ESR (P=0.11), percent of smudge cells in peripheral blood smear (P=0.94), and absolute lymphocyte count (P=0.18) with the stage of disease and prognosis, but the β2 macroglobulin level (p<0.0001), LDT (p<0.001) had direct and significant relation with staging and outcome. In 19% of patients cytogenetic alteration were seen.

CONCLUSION

The detection of cytogenetic alteration only using the CC method is not sufficient and we need to use FISH, but because FISH study is an expensive method not available in all areas, we believe that β2 MG can be applied in its place as a good prognostic factor for CLL at diagnosis and during follow up. We suggest to add it to Binet staging for prognostic subgrouping of CLL.