The nucleoside analogue, pentostatin, has demonstrated high complete response rates and long relapse-free survival times in patients with hairy cell leukemia, a disease that historically had been unresponsive to treatment. Long-term data on duration of overall survival and relapse-free survival and incidence of subsequent malignancies with this agent are lacking. Patients completing the treatme...

The nucleoside analogue, pentostatin, has demonstrated high complete response rates and long relapse-free survival times in patients with hairy cell leukemia, a disease that historically had been unresponsive to treatment. Long-term data on duration of overall survival and relapsefree survival and incidence of subsequent malignancies with this agent are lacking. Patients completing the treatmen...

The malignant monoclonal population in hairy cell leukemia (HCL) has been variously ascribed to be of myeloid, B, or even T cell origin. Recent data have been interpreted as suggesting that hairy cells (HC) may concomitantly or serially express both B and T surface determinants, a phenomenon which, if verified, would be unique among the lymphoproliferative malignancies. Data described here, how...

We previously reported isolation of human T-cell leukemia virus II (HTLV-II) from a second patient (N.R.A.) with atypical hairy cell leukemia. Follow-up analysis of the characteristics of the patient's HTLV-II infection over a 2-year period has revealed that the patient had two coexistant lymphoproliferative disorders. Oligoclonally integrated HTLV-II was detected in DNA extracted from the pati...

Hairy cell leukemia (HCL) is frequently associated with severe pancytopenia. The authors detected high levels of tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-alpha in the bone marrow serum of patients with HCL and found anti-TNF-alpha neutralizing monoclonal antibodies (MoAbs) to be able to enhance hematopoiesis of HCL patients in in vitro colony assays. As potent producers of TNF-alpha, hairy cells could be id...

In this issue of Blood, Rosenberg et al provide a detailed retrospective description of the long-term outcome of young patients with a diagnosis of hairy cell leukemia treated with cladribine.

Purpose: To determine tolerability and for the first time explore efficacy of bendamustine–rituximab (BR) in multiply relapsed/refractory hairy cell leukemia (HCL), using two different dose levels of

Objective. We present a successful case of laparoscopic splenectomy for a massively enlarged spleen at 25 weeks of gestation for hairy cell leukemia in pregnancy in a woman with initial hemoglobin of 4.3 gm/dl and platelet count of 18,000/mm(3). Study Design. Case report. Results. This report provides an approach to management that may be applicable in those cases where thrombocytopenia or othe...

1Institute of Hematology, University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy; 2Hematology, University of Siena and Azienda Ospedaliera Universitaria Senese, Siena, Italy; 3Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, Hematology and Clinical Immunology Section, University of Padua, Padua, Italy; 4Department of Medicine, Hematology Section, University of Verona, Verona, Italy; 5Department of Pathology, C...

Low-dose interferon-alpha (IFN-alpha) therapy is consistently effective in the treatment of hairy cell leukemia (HCL). In two cases of resistance to IFN-alpha administration, we diagnosed variant HCL, a form of HCL with intermediate features between typical HCL and B cell prolymphocytic leukemia. We tried to distinguish variant and typical hairy cells (HCs) by Northern blot analysis of the onco...