Monoclonal gammopathy in a child with leukemia.

P ARAPROTEINS* ARE generally found in the serum in patients suffering from multiple myeloma or Waldenstr#{246}m’s macroglobulinemia. Recently, however, there have been a number of reports on patients in whom paraproteinemia#{176} was found in association with a myeloproliferative disorder such as polycythemia, erythroleukemia, acute myeloblastic and lymphoblastic leukemia, and chronic myelocytic leukemia.1 Paraproteinemia in children is exceedingly rare. Stoop et al.2 observed a clear-cut case of paraproteinemia in a child; Hochwald and Thorbecke3 described a child whose CSF contained a paraprotein. The child described by Schaller et al.4 was probably suffering from paraproteinemia also, although these investigators failed to establish this with certainty. Dalloz et al.5 observed a child with Aldrich’s syndrome in whom transient paraproteinemia was demonstrated. Harhoe et al.#{176} described a patient who developed a donor-type paraproteinemia following a thymus gland transplantation. In a recent publication Danon et al.7 mention four children with paraproteinemia, including two who had been previously discussed in the literature; the two new cases concerned a 6 month old boy with dual paraproteinemia and a 3 year old girl with acute myeloid leukemia and (transient?) paraproteinemia. This report describes a well-documented case of paraproteinemia in association with an acute leukemia disorder in a child.