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Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics

Newly diagnosed acute lymphoblastic leukemia in China (I): abnormal genetic patterns in 1346 childhood and adult cases and their comparison with the reports from Western countries

Leukemia volume 26, pages 1608–1616 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

It has been generally acknowledged that the diagnosis, treatment and prognosis evaluation of leukemia largely rely on an adequate identification of genetic abnormalities. A systemic analysis of genetic aberrations was performed in a cohort of 1346 patients with newly diagnosed acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) in China. The pediatric patients had higher incidence of hyperdiploidy and t(12;21) (p13;q22)/ETV6–RUNX1 than adults (P<0.0001); in contrast, the occurrence of Ph and Ik6 variant of IKZF1 gene was much more frequent in adult patients (all P<0.0001). In B-ALL, the existence of Ik6 and that of BCR–ABL were statistically correlated (P<0.0001). In comparison with Western cohorts, the incidence of t(9;22) (q34;q11)/BCR–ABL (14.60%) in B-ALL and HOX11 expression in T-ALL (25.24%) seemed to be much higher in our group, while the incidence of t(12;21) (p13;q22)/ETV6–RUNX1 (15.34%) seemed to be lower in Chinese pediatric patients. The occurrence of hyperdiploidy was much lower either in pediatric (10.61% vs 20–38%) or adult patients (2.36% vs 6.77–12%) in our study than in Western reports. In addition, the frequencies of HOX11L2 in adult patients were much higher in our cohort than in Western countries (20.69% vs 4–11%). In general, it seems that Chinese ALL patients bear more adverse prognostic factors than their Western counterparts do.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Mega project of Ministry of Science and Technology (2008ZX09312-026, 2009ZX09103-431), the National Basic Research Program (973, 2010CB529200), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (30871106, 30772744, 30821063) and Science and Technology Commission Foundation of Shanghai (09dZ1974500).

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  1. B Chen, Y-Y Wang and Y Shen: These authors contributed equally to this work.

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  1. State Key Laboratory of Medical Genomics, Shanghai Institute of Hematology, Rui Jin Hospital, affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China

    B Chen, Y-Y Wang, Y Shen, W-N Zhang, H-Y He, Y-M Zhu, H-M Chen, C-H Gu, X Fan, J-M Chen, Q Cao, G Yang, C-L Jiang, X-Q Weng, X-X Zhang, S-M Xiong, Z-X Shen, Z Chen, J-Q Mi & S-J Chen

  2. Department of Hematology, Shanghai Children's Hospital, Shanghai, China

    H Jiang

  3. Department of Hematology, Shanghai Children's Medical Center (SCMC), affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China

    L-J Gu

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Chen, B., Wang, YY., Shen, Y. et al. Newly diagnosed acute lymphoblastic leukemia in China (I): abnormal genetic patterns in 1346 childhood and adult cases and their comparison with the reports from Western countries. Leukemia 26, 1608–1616 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/leu.2012.26

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