What are the Phases of CML? Video Transcript

Participants

, Carolyn Blasdel RN, Gwen L. Nichols MD

Summary

The three phases of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) are chronic, accelerated and blast. Learn what each phase means and how your body will respond to them.

Webcast Transcript

Most people who are diagnosed with CML are diagnosed in what is called chronic phase. The technical definition of this is that there are less than 15 percent blasts (and blasts are immature blood cells or leukemia cells) either in the blood or in the bone marrow. Before Gleevec, people were often told they had about five years to live in chronic phase. And then what could happen is they would progress into something called accelerated phase and that meant that there were more of these immature cells in their blood and bone marrow, like more than 15 percent. And then after six to nine months of accelerated phase, the disease could become worse, and there would be more and more immature blood cells or blasts and that's called blast crisis.

Once a person enters blast crisis, it's clinically—looks like acute leukemia. And the bone marrow is so full of immature blood cells that never become properly functioning blood cells that everything else is crowded out. So the leukemia cells pack the marrow. The marrow is no longer able to make good white cells to fight infection. It's no longer able to make enough red cells to carry oxygen in the blood, so people can become very anemic and also no longer able to make platelets. And platelets are important in blood-clotting, so people can have problems then with infection and bleeding and severe anemia.