Researchers May Have Found the Leukemia Cause

A new study may shed light into why leukemia, one of the deadliest cancers, develops in the first place.

Although leukemia is one of the best studied cancers, the cause of some types is still poorly understood, but experts in the Us say a new formula may make it potential for healthcare experts to peruse why the disease forms.

What Is Leukemia

Specialists at the Abramson Cancer town of the University of Pennsylvania said that a newly-found mutation in acute myeloid leukemia patients could inventory for half of the remaining cases of adult acute leukemia which have no known origin.

Senior author Dr Craig Thompson, director of the facility, said the molecular biology of leukemia has been studied for the last 20 years and experts understanding they had found most of the coarse genes for it.

"Now we're able to point to a positive type of mutation for half of the remaining leukemia's for which we didn't know the cause and between one-quarter and one-third of leukemia's in older patients.

Every year more than 7,000 citizen are diagnosed with leukemia in the Uk, or around 19 citizen every day, manufacture it the tenth most coarse cancer, with more than 4,200 new cases diagnosed in 2006 alone.

The new findings, published this week in Cancer Cell, propose that acute myeloid leukemia (Aml) patients have increased levels of a molecule called 2Hg.

Aml is a quick-moving, deadly cancer that starts in the bone marrow and soon moves into the blood, and the specialists found that increased amounts of 2Hg stem from a mutation in one of two connected metabolic enzymes, Idh1 or Idh2.

Dr Thompson commented: "If we're able to block tumours from producing 2Hg, maybe we would be able to stop the patient's leukemia."

Researchers May Have Found the Leukemia Cause