A retrospective cytogenetic abnormality in pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia: Report of 11 years

Acute lymphoid leukemia (ALL) is the largest subset of hematologic malignancies, accounting for approximately 70%–80% of childhood leukemia, and is most common at age 4 years. The aim of this study was to define the frequency of chromosomal abnormalities in pediatric ALL.

In this 11‑year retrospective study, we investigated 99 patients which referred to our department due to ALL from 2010 to 2020. The age group of the patients ranged from 6 months to 14 years with a mean of 6.71 ± 4.09 years. Clinical and diagnostic findings were extracted from patients’ medical records.

We showed cytogenetic abnormalities of 99 pediatric ALL patients, including 78 pre‑B‑ALL, 9 common B‑ALL, and 12 T‑ALL cases. The 5‑year overall survival rate (OSR) and event‑free survival (EFS) of all cytogenetic abnormalities(n = 99) were 48% and 43%, respectively. There was a significant relationship between the two cytogenetic abnormalities, hypodiploidy and t(9;22), with death (P < 0.05). On comparing the subjects with normal cytogenetics to the other cytogenetic abnormalities, EFS was significantly low for hypodiploidy (P = 0.0163, hazard ratio = 0.5308) and t(9;22) (P = 0.0131, hazard ratio = 0.4908), while other cytogenetic abnormalities did not have a statistically significant difference in EFS.

Our results emphasized the importance of the cytogenetic findings in evaluating the survival outcomes, which allows identifying a variety of OSR and EFS, because some of the cytogenetic abnormalities may interfere with the death and prognosis.