Leukaemia

Leukaemia is cancer of your white blood cells and bone marrow (the soft spongy tissue that fills the centre of some of your bones). New blood cells are normally made in your bone marrow and then move into your blood. Old cells are replaced when needed. 

With leukaemia, the process of making and replacing blood cells goes wrong. Immature blood cells divide quickly and do not grow into mature cells. These immature cells crowd your bone marrow and prevent it from making normal healthy cells. 

You get symptoms because there aren’t enough healthy blood cells to do their jobs in the body and the increasing number of leukaemia cells are a burden on your system.

There are 4 main types of leukaemia. These are 

• Acute myeloid leukaemia (AML)
• Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL)
• Chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) 
• Chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL)

To understand leukaemia it helps to understand how blood cells are made.

All blood cells come from cells known as stem cells. These start out as immature cells (blast cells) and then they develop into different types of mature blood cells.

There are 4 main types of leukaemia - AML, ALL, CML and CLL. Their names come from the type of cell affected by the leukaemia (lymphoid blast cells or myeloid blast cells) and from how quickly they develop (acute or chronic).

• Acute: The leukaemia develops very quickly over days or weeks.
• Chronic: The disease develops slowly, usually over months or years.

Each type of leukaemia has its own features and treatment.