Expectancy for Life in Chronic Lymphatic Leukemia.

By ROBERT A. GREEN AND HUBERT DIXON T HERE ARE WIDE discrepancies in published data on survival in chronic leukemia, and it is not clear what the real prospects for survival are in this group of diseases. We have impressions of a variable chronicity, but there is need for standards if the results of new methods of treatment are to be meaningful, and it is important to know how valid the standard series are. Obvious reasons, in terms of selection and methods of analysis, account for some of the discrepancies. The largest of the reference series, that of Tivey1 published in 1954, has served as a baseline for most subsequent comparisons. The data in another large series reported in 1960 by Feinleib and MacMahon2 differ widely from Tivey’s. The results reported by Osgood3.4 differ from both cf these and were in fact, superior to any results reported to date. The analysis of 125 cases of chronic lymphatic leukemia reported in this paper was originally undertaken for purposes of comparing survival in a series treated in an unprogrammed manner by conventional methods, with the survival in Osgood’s series in which all patients were treated by the structured program of titrated, regularly spaced total-body irradiation. When these results were compared with the reference series noted above, differences in survival were so striking that it also seemed worthwhile to consider how such marked