Not all leukemias are the same. This is the starting point for trying to understand the differences between one form and another. There are leukemia pathologies that mainly affect young people, others that instead occur mainly in adults and the elderly. Precisely to this second type belongs the one which, according to what the AIL (Italian Association against Leukemia, Lymphoma and Myeloma) website reports, represents the most frequent of the so-called myelodysplastic-myeloproliferative syndromes. This disease, in particular, affects specific white blood cells called monocytes. And it is precisely to this family of cells that it owes its name.
Two different shapes
What happens when a person develops this pathology? Basically there can be two types of situations, and for this we speak of chronic myelomonocytic leukemia as a condition that presents typical characteristics of diseases in which the blood cells reproduce uncontrollably and abnormally (precisely the myeloproliferative forms) and those in which the progenitor units of the blood cells found in the bone marrow mature in a abnormal, and then develop into a pathological form.
Also on the AIL website we read that precisely because of these characteristics, the “traces” that the disease leaves in terms of symptoms and laboratory tests can vary. If it prevails the dysplastic form you tend to have a low number of white blood cells and especially neutrophils with neutropenia, as well as anemia. In the proliferative form instead the white blood cells grow. In any case immature cells are present as well as monocyte white blood cells always increase.
The pathology obviously has different pictures and also variable prognoses, with therapies that must be defined on a case-by-case basis. They range from donor marrow transplantation, which in any case has the limitation of being feasible only in certain conditions and not in older people, up to specific drugs to be used based on the characteristics of the patient and the pathology.
What are white blood cells
These cells can be considered the “mobile units” of the body’s defense system. There are different types. While granulocytes are produced in the bone marrow, lymphocytes and monocytes come from lymph nodes. All cells, however, can then be found in the blood, which transports them to the areas where their intervention is needed.
In each cubic millimeter of blood there are about 6-7,000 white blood cells of five types: neutrophils (about 60 percent of the total) primarily responsible for the defense that attacks bacteria, lymphocytes (25-30 percent of the total) which react against the different types of microorganisms, the eosinophils (2-3 percent) responsible for the defense against allergic reactions and against parasites such as tapeworm, the basophils (less than 1 percent) which set in motion the release of substances that mediate inflammation and finally monocytes, large cells that swell up to become macrophages capable of “incorporating” small bacterial colonies.
Bibliographic source
Chronic myelomonocytic leukemia (CMLM)AIL (Italian Association against Leukemia, Lymphoma and Myeloma)