[Studies on the fragments of FDP in 3 patients with DIC associated with acute promyelocytic leukemia].

We previously reported a study on fibrinolysis and fibrinogenolysis that analyzed fragments of fibrin/fibrinogen degradation products (FDP) using sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and immunoblotting. In this report, we characterized the fragments of FDP in three patients with disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC) associating with acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL). D, Y, DD, DY/X and high molecular weight fragments were observed in sera of all the patients obtained at the onset of APL. These results showed that various degrees of fibrinogenolysis, concomitant with fibrinolysis, was occurring in APL patients presenting DIC. However, changes in the patterns of the FDP fragments during anticoagulation therapy were apparently different among three patients. Namely, fibrinogenolysis was dominant in case 1, while fibrinolysis was dominant in case 2. Interestingly, fibrinogenolysis and fibrinolysis were almost equivalent from the onset to the end of DIC in case 3. In case 3, FDP and FDP-D dimer were remarkably elevated about two months before the onset of APL, although their elevation was not complicated with DIC but with bone marrow necrosis. At that time, serum LDH levels and plasma polymorphonuclear elastase (PMN-Ela) were increased presumably due to the release of these enzymes from necrotic bone marrow, and the levels of CRP and plasma fibrinogen were increased probably due to an infectious complication. In non-DIC period of case 3, FDP and FDP-D dimer were spontaneously decreased without reduction of PMN-Ela levels, after three weeks of chemotherapy for microbial agents. Taken together, characteristics of FDP fragments were unique to each case of APL-DIC, probably because many factors differently affected the degradation of fibrin and/or fibrinogen.