Pregnancy and Health Care

Posts Tagged ‘childhood leukemia’

While in Mexico, leukemia remains the most common cancer in children, with early diagnosis to 70% of patients can achieve a total cure. According to Dr. Hugo Rivera Marquez, Chief of Pediatric Oncology Hospital National Medical Center Siglo XXI IMSS, are diagnosed each year, nationwide, 7 000 200 cases of cancer in children, most of them are developed by multifactorial factors and less by genetic or hereditary causes.

The specialist recommended that parents, be alert to changes and symptoms they observe in their children such as prolonged fever, swelling in the abdomen, pallor, loss of energy and weight quickly and headaches persist. Bleeding may also occur, loss of balance, sudden change in behavior of the child or the child and decrease or loss of vision. As in all cases, it is essential to see a doctor and rule out self-medication. If you make a diagnosis and prescribe appropriate treatment, the prognosis for children with leukemia is very good.

Types of leukemia in children
Approximately 98% of leukemias in children are acute and are divided into acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) and acute myeloid leukemia (AML). About 60% of children with leukemia suffer first and about 38% of AML. Lymphocytic how the disease occurs more often in small 2 to 8 years , with a marked incidence at the age of 4 years. If a child has a twin who was diagnosed with the disease before age 6, has a chance of developing ALL or AML of 20% to 25%. In general, twins and other siblings of children with leukemia have an increased risk of developing the disease two to four times higher than average. Read the rest of this entry »

For a long time to identify the cells that cause leukemia, was one of the great mysteries for researchers in the cancer. Although it was known that the causal factor was primarily genetic, recently made ??an important discovery that has opened new hopes to the treatment of childhood leukemia, -the most common type of cancer in children and adolescents. Medical advances in the treatment of this disease, which until recently was considered fatal, have been enormous, to the point that today, we talk about a survival rate reaches 80% in cases of acute lymphoblastic leukemia, the type of leukemia most often in children. Thanks to a joint study by scientists at the University of Oxford, Great Ormond Street children’s hospital in London and the Association of Cancer Research Medical Research, has taken an important step in the fight against childhood leukemia to discover “the origin “of this disease. The results of this research were recently published in the U.S. journal “Science.”

The finding came after monitoring the case of two twin four-year-old living in southern England, of which one was healthy and one affected by this type of cancer . Although both had preleukemic cells, only one of them developed the disease. The scientists found that a genetic mutation is responsible for the origin of childhood leukemia and explained that “the development of blood cell cancer in childhood, requires a” small but crucial group of cells “suffer two mutations.” The first occurs during the first period of gestation and the second during the first months of life the child. According to experts, this second genetic modification could be triggered by a common infection (such as a cold), preleukemic cells to transform into malignant cells resistant to chemotherapy.

According to the study, “1% of children have preleukemic cells, but of these, very few suffer the second and Mutation. “This finding is encouraging for the scientific community, it opens the way for the investigation of shorter treatments, less aggressive and less side effects, which seek to attack only the malignant cells. Now the new challenge of pediatric oncology is not only to cure cancer, but to provide the best possible quality of life for children with this disease.

A study by the University Hospital Arrixaca (Murcia, Spain) linked the risk of childhood leukemia with prolonged exposure to air pollution from traffic.

One of the main findings of this investigation determined that the fact of living during pregnancy to less than 100 meters of a road with heavy traffic in children doubled the risk of developing leukemia.

Specifically, this research studied the health of 187 children who were exposed to air pollution during pregnancy, with the result that 45.5% of them (85 children) had hematologic malignancies, whether leukemia or lymphoma.

Snuff In 2005, a team of researchers from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) concluded that smoking during pregnancy increases the risk of childhood leukemia. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The investigation showed that carcinogens in snuff products can cross the placenta and directly affect fetal genetic material, causing injury associated with various types of childhood leukemia. The results were obtained from follow-up of 50 women undergoing prenatal diagnosis and conducting 800 interviews.

After analysis, we found that the fetuses of smoking mothers showed a significant increase in chromosome abnormalities compared to those of nonsmokers.