A High Long-Term Survival Were Produced by Early Sequential Intensive Consolidation Chemotherapy Followed by Autologous Stem Cell Transplantation in First Complete Remission in Patients with Adult Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia.

Abstract

Objective: To investigate the efficiency of our designed protocol with early sequential intensive consolidation chemotherapy followed by autologous stem cell transplantation (ASCT) in first complete remission (CR1)on adult acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) patients who lack of matched sibling donors.Methods: The ALL patients were given a median 4 intensive/ consolidation therapy courses including high-dose of methotrexate, cytarabine and/or cyclophosphamide in CR1, followed by ASCT with total body irradiation (TBI)-based conditioning regimen. A 1 to 1.5 year maintenance chemotherapy with 6-mercaptopurine, methotrexate and vincristine-prednisone in combination with interleukin-2/IFN-α immunotherapy were administered after adequate hematological recovery.Results: A total of 83 patients were enrolled in this study. 78 patients reconstituted hematopoiesis except 5 patients died of early toxicity. By a median 47(3– 218) months follow-up after ASCT, the 5-year probabilities of leukemia free survival (LFS) and overall survival (OS) were 53.2%±5.9% and 54.4%±5.8%, respectively. The 5-year cumulative relapse rate (RR) was 35.7%±6.1%, and no patients relapsed more than 3 years after transplantation. According to the adverse features, age ≥35 years, WBC >30×109/L for B-cell ALL or >100×109/L for T-ALL, Pro-B and early T immunotyping, more than 4 weeks to attain remission, and high-risk karyotypes including t(9;22)/BCRABL, t(4;11)/ALL1-AF4 or t(1;19)/E2A-PBX1, the patients were identified in 3 prognostic risk groups of standard (24, 29.0%), intermediate(32, 38.5%), and high(27, 32.5%) with 0, 1, 2 or high-risk karyotypes adverse features, respectively. The 5-year probabilities of DFS were 80.36%±9.0%, 59.39%±9.2% and 24.78%±8.9% in these 3 group s, respectively. While, the 5-year cumulative incidences of relapse was 16.7%,37.5% and 70.4%, respectively.. The standard and intermediate -risk groups had significantly better OS and LFS than the high-risk group.Conclusion: Theses results indicated our designed protocol with early sequential intensive consolidation chemotherapy followed by autologous stem cell transplantation (ASCT) in first complete remission (CR1) could produced a relatively high log-term survival in standard and intermediate-risk group of adult ALL patients.