Leukaemia can refer to all cancers affecting the white blood cells. How the cancer spreads can depend on the type of leukaemia and how aggressive it is.
What is Leukaemia
This is a blood cancer caused by a rise in the number of white blood cells in your body.
Those white blood cells crowd out the red blood cells and platelets that your body needs to be healthy. The extra white blood cells don’t work right.
Symptoms
Different types of this condition can cause different problems. You might not notice any signs in the early stages of some forms. When you do have symptoms, they may include:
Weakness or fatigue
Fever or chills
Bruising or bleeding easily
Pain in your bones or joints
Infections that are severe or keep coming back
Headaches
Vomiting
Seizures
Weight loss
Shortness of breath
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Types Of Leukaemia
There are four main types of this condition.
Acute Lymphocytic Leukaemia (ALL)
This is the most common form of childhood leukaemia. It can spread to your lymph nodes and central nervous system.
Acute Myelogenous Leukaemia (AML)
This is the second most common form in childhood and one of the most common forms for adults.
Chronic Lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL)
This is the most common form in adult. Some kinds of CLL will be stable for years and won’t need treatment. But with others, your body isn’t able to create normal blood cells, and you’ll need treatment.
Chronic Myelogenous Leukaemia (CML)
With this, you might not have noticeable symptoms. You might not be diagnosed with it until you have a routine blood test. People 65 and older have a higher risk of this type.
 Diagnosis
You will need to see a doctor to check for signs of leukaemia in your blood or bone marrow.
The tests to do include:
Blood Tests
A complete blood count (CBC) looks at the number and maturity of different types of blood cells.
A blood smear looks for unusual or immature cells.
Bone Marrow Biopsy
This test involves marrow taken from your pelvic bone with a long needle. It can tell your doctor what kind of leukaemia you have and how severe it is.
Spinal Tap
This involves fluid from your spinal cord. It can tell your doctor whether the blood cancer has spread.
Treatments For Leukaemia
The treatment you get depends on the type of leukaemia you have, how far it’s spread, and how healthy you are. The main options are:
Chemotherapy
It is the use of drugs to kill cancer cells. Depending on the type of leukaemia, you may take either a single drug or a combination of different drugs.
Radiation For Leukaemia Treatment
This is use of high-energy radiation to damage the cancer cells and inhibit their growth.
Radiation can be applied to a specific area or to your entire body.
Biologic Therapy
This is the use of treatments that help your immune system recognise and attack cancer cells.
Targeted Therapy
Targeted therapy uses medications that take advantage of vulnerabilities in cancer cells.
For example, imatinib (Gleevec) is a targeted drug that’s commonly used against CML.
Stem Cell Transplant
A stem cell transplant replaces diseased bone marrow with healthy bone marrow, either your own (called autologous transplantation) or from a donor (called allogeneic transplantation). This procedure is also called a bone marrow transplant.
The long-term outlook for people who have leukaemia depends on the type of cancer they have and their stage at diagnosis.
The sooner leukaemia is diagnosed and the faster it’s treated, the better your chance of recovery is.
