title: Prognostic significance of cell surface phenotype in acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  To find out the phenotypic character of lymphoblasts of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) patients in our study cohort and their possible effect on the prognosis.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  To investigate the phenotype in ALL in our demographic population and to prognosticate various upfront current protocols employed in our hospital.
  
  
  METHODS
  The study spanned over a period of 4 years with retrospective and prospective data of January 2008 through December 2011.
  
  
  METHODS
  159 patients of all age groups were enrolled for the study, of which flow cytometry was done in 144 patients.
  
  
  METHODS
  Analysis was done using the variables on SPSS (statistical package for social sciences) software on computer. Survival curves were estimated by method of Kaplan-Meir.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Majority of the patients were of B-cell (68.1%) and 30.6% patients were of T-cell lineage. Of these, 80.6% patients were having cALLa positivity. Complete remission (CR) was achieved in 59.1%, 16.4% relapsed, and 20.1% patients died.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Phenotyping has become an important and integral part of diagnosis, classification, management and prognosticating in ALL. B-cell has been found to have a better survival over T-cell lymphoblastic leukemia. cALLa antigen positivity has good impact in achieving CR in only B-cell lineage, myeloid coexpression has no significant effect on the outcome. BFM (Berlin-Frankfurt-Münster) based protocols though showed a higher CR and survival vis-a-vis UKALL-XII. However, patients enrolled in former group being of low risk category and lesser in numbers cannot be compared statistically with a fair degree of confidence.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Oncology, Sher-I-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India.
authors.forename: Shiek Aejaz
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Aziz
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Oncology, Sher-I-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India.
authors.forename: Susheel Kumar
authors.initials: SK
authors.lastname: Sharma
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Pharmacology, Sher-I-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India.
authors.forename: Iram
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Sabah
authors.affiliation: Deaprtment of Clinical Hematology, Sher-I-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India.
authors.forename: M Aleem
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Jan
keywords: Acute lymphoblastic leukemia; India; Kashmir; flow cytometry; immunophenotype; leukemia; phenotype; prognosis