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Leukaemia
What is Leukaemia?
A cancer of your body's blood-forming tissues, especially your white cells, including your bone marrow and lymphatic system is called leukaemia.
When your body is trying to fight infection it selects the white cells. These cells usually function and grow in a very formal and ordered way but in Leukaemia that growth becomes chaotic and the result is there are large numbers of cells which are abnormal. Because of those abnormalities, they simply don’t do the job of fighting infection very well.
Leukaemia affects all ages and depending on the nature of the cells the condition can be divided into four main groups and then, into many more sub groups.
If I have Leukaemia, what symptoms would I have?
Just as everybody is an individual so are the symptoms of the condition, and they include
• Persistent fatigue, weakness
• Fever or chills
• Frequent infections
• Swollen lymph nodes, enlarged liver or spleen
• Loss of appetite or weight
• Easy bleeding or bruising
• Shortness of breath
• Petechiae which are tiny red spots in your skin
• Excessive sweating, especially at night
• Bone pain or tenderness.
What is of concern is that in the early days or weeks of Leukaemia, it can remain undiagnosed because the symptoms may be mistaken for the flu. Just how bad the symptoms and the signs are depends on the number of white cells affected and degree of spread within the body.
What causes the cells to change in the way they do?
One of the ways of describing what is happening is to divide the condition on two things: How fast do the abnormal cells grow and on the types of blood cells which are affected.
How fast?
• Acute Leukaemia. This means the very early cells in the blood are the ones causing trouble. These early cells which are called blasts can’t do the infection fighting work they are meant to do and because the rate of division is so fast so needs to be the therapy.
• Chronic Leukaemia. This is where the cancerous changes have occurred in developed cells and because the speed is less and the abnormal cells are slower in developing the unaffected cells can do some of the infection fighting they are designed for. It’s not uncommon for the diagnosis to be missed in these cases.
Links
| For more vital information on Leukaemia, travel to this link from the Mayo Clinic. |  |
 | In Australia the Leukaemia Foundation (a not-for-profit organisation) assists patients and families living with leukaemias, lymphomas, myeloma and related blood disorders.
Contact them on Freecall: 1800 620 420 or http://www.leukaemia.org.au/ |
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