Corporate Symposium Strategies for Advanced Apl: Long-term Followup of Arsence Therapy and New Approaches

Introduction The majority of patients with newly diagnosed acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL) are cured of their disease. However, a relatively small percentage of patients, often those who present with high-risk disease, relapse. While some patients relapse at the molecular level, others do so with overt morphologic disease. With contemporary strategies, the relapse rate (RR) for lowand intermediate-risk patients at three-years appears less than 5 percent. For highrisk patients, the three-year RR is approximately 20 percent. Late relapses have rarely been reported both in the pre-ATRA as well as the ATRA-era. An increase in extramedullary relapses have been suggested by some anecdotal reports, but not clearly confirmed by other larger studies.