Abstract
A large amount of karyotype analysis was performed on 16 cases with chronic myelocytic leukemia at the time of diagnosis and of those 6 cases at blastic phase, in order to investigate pathophysiological conditions of CML from cytogenetic point of view.
All cases examined in chronic phase, even in the early phase of the disease, were found to have 1.3 to 12.4 percent of additional abnormal cells, showing numerical changes in chromosomes 8, 9, 15, 18 and 21, and structural changes in chromosomes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 17 and 18, including common karyotypic abnormalities found in blastic phase, such as +9, +18 and +22q-. Of the six cases examined at both phases, chronic and blastic, only one case (#1) showed gradual increase of abnormal clone found in chronic phase and finally terminated in blastic phase with additional chromosome aberrations of i(17q). Four cases showed new additional abnormal clones during the chronic phase (#3 and 6) or at the time of blastic phase (#2 and 4). The last case (#5) did not show any additional clone during the coruse of the disease.
These findings indicate that Ph1 positive cells are essentially labile and acquisite easily additional chromosome aberrations in any stage of the disease.
