Leukemia (Blood Cancer)

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Leukemia (Blood Cancer) Every four minutes someone in the United States is diagnosed with some type of leukemia. Making it one the most commonly contracted cancers today, affecting people of all ages. Leukemia is one is one of the most widespread cancers in the world. According to a recent poll conducted with 100 students, faculty, and staff of Crane high School 62.5% of participants have known someone who has had Leukemia while the other 37.5% have not(1). This small collection of data shows the sheer commonness of Leukemia. Currently 310,000 people in the U.S. are dealing with Leukemia, so chances are that most people have a social connection to someone with Leukemia. (1)
The Four Types of leukemia
Leukemia is basically when cancer affects …show more content…
These include fever, bone pain, lethargy/fatigue, shortness of breath, low skin pigment, frequent infections, easy bruising, and unusual bleeding. Along with ALL the symptoms of AML may resemble the common symptoms of the flu. (12) Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML), one of the rarest types of leukemia, has symptoms that may also closely relate to other forms of leukemia. They include unusual bleeding, fever, loss of weight without trying, loss of appetite, pain or fullness below the ribs on the left side, pale skin, extreme night sweats, and feeling run-down or tired. The symptoms of this particular cancer may not make themselves apparent for the beginning stages of its development. Recipients may go several months to years without showing any severe signs of contraction or illness.(13) Acute Myelogenous Leukemia (AML), the other fast growing leukemia type, has a mixture of the other leukemias’ symptoms. Common symptoms include fever, bone pain, lethargy, shortness of breath, pale skin, frequent infections, easy bruising, and unusual bleeding. Like most leukemias AML and its symptoms can go unnoticed for long periods of …show more content…
By far the most popular form of treatment is chemotherapy (6). Chemo uses chemicals to work at killing the cancerous cells in the body, although this helps get rid of the bad cells in the body, it also gets rid of the healthy cells that fight disease (4). So when a patient undergoes chemotherapy a simple cold can become deadly (3). A treatment not as popular as chemo, biological therapy, uses different treatments to help the body’s immune system find a way to recognize and fight the cancerous cells on its own. Targeted therapy, another treatment, uses medicines that directly target the volrubilites of the patients cancer cells (15). Radiation therapy, another popular treatment, is where large amounts of radiation are used to kill the cancerous cells in specific parts of the body. When someone goes through radiation treatment there are put in a machine where either certain areas that have excessive leukemic cells or the whole body are treated. Another treatment used to treat leukemia is a stem cell transplant. In a stem cell transplant doctors do a procedure where they replace diseased bone marrow with healthy bone marrow in hopes to get rid of the cancerous cells and stop production of unhealthy cells. They healthy bone marrow is donated and then injected into the recipient in
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