Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, a malignant disorder of lymphoid progenitor cells, affects both children and adults, with peak prevalence between the ages of 2 and 5 years. Steady progress in development of effective treatments has led to a cure rate of more than 80% in children, creating opportunities for innovative approaches that would preserve past gains in leukaemia-free survival while redu...

BACKGROUND Previous studies on vaccination and childhood leukaemia generated inconsistent results. METHODS In the Northern California Childhood Leukaemia Study, a case-control study with incident cases and matched birth certificate controls, detailed written vaccination records were collected. A total of 323 cases aged 0-14 years at diagnosis and 409 controls were included in this analysis. A...

The bovine leukaemia inhibitory factor was isolated from a phage library and sequences for the gene, in addition to 1213 bp of 5' and 432 bp of 3' sequences, were obtained and compared with other mammalian leukaemia inhibitory factor genes. Comparisons indicated amino acid homologies ranging from 89.6% to 77.2% with the human and mouse homologues, respectively. Analysis of 500 bp of 5' regulato...

OBJECTIVE To follow-up on earlier studies of the leukaemogenicity of occupational ionising radiation exposure. METHODS We conducted a nested case-control analysis of leukaemia mortality in a pooled cohort of US nuclear workers followed through 2005. Each case was matched to four controls on attained age. Exposures were estimated from available records. General relative risk models were used t...

OBJECTIVE To assess the risk factors for leukaemic transformation and myeloid leukaemia in patients with SLE. METHODS A national SLE cohort identified through SLE discharge diagnoses in the Swedish hospital discharge register during 1964 to 1995 (n = 6438) was linked to the national cancer register. A nested case-control study in SLE patients who developed acute or chronic myeloid leukaemia w...

AIM To analyse the association between potential environmental exposure to hydrocarbons and the risk of acute childhood leukaemia. METHODS A hospital based multicentre case control study, stratified on centre, age, and sex, with 280 leukaemia cases and 285 controls was carried out. Data were collected by a standardised interview of the mothers. RESULTS No clear association was seen between ...

Neurogenesis continues in the adult brain and in the adult olfactory epithelium. The cytokine, leukaemia inhibitory factor and nitric oxide are both known to stimulate neuronal progenitor cell proliferation in the olfactory epithelium after injury. Our aim here was to determine whether these observations are independent, specifically, whether leukaemia inhibitory factor triggers neural precurso...

Orbital or subconjunctival infiltration occurs frequently in acute and chronic lymphatic leukaemia, but only rarely in myelogenous leukaemia (Chatterjee and Sen, I 960). Chloroma, an atypical form of myeloblastic leukaemia, often manifests itself as a localized mass in the orbital periosteum, and the proptosis produced in such cases may be the first sign of the disease (Goodman and Iverson, I94...

Leukaemia cells that are resistant to conventional therapies are thought to reside in protective niches. Here, we describe light-inducible polymeric retinoic acid (RA)-containing nanoparticles (NPs) with the capacity to accumulate in the cytoplasm of leukaemia cells for several days and release their RA payloads within a few minutes upon exposure to blue/UV light. Compared to NPs that are not a...

T he incidence rate of childhood leukaemia varies internationally (about 4–40/10 per year) with the lowest rates being recorded in black African children. The data from population based studies on the incidence of childhood leukaemia in South Asia, including Pakistan, are lacking. The development of leukaemia has been considered as an infectious process. However, the epidemiological evidence fo...