Acute myeloid leukemia in the elderly people

Abstract

The majority of patients with acute myeloid leukemia are elderly. The introduction of new more aggressive treatment regimens with allogeneic stem cell transplantation have resulted in improvement in clinical outcome of younger AML patients, but analogous improvement in older patients has not been realized. There is evidence that AML in elderly represents a biologically distinct disease that is more aggressive and less responsive to chemotherapy. The important task is to use prognostic factors and predictive modeling to distinguish patients who will benefit from intensive remission-induction approaches and allogeneic transplantation and others who should be managed with less aggressive strategies or novel agents.