Therapy-Related Acute Megakaryoblastic Leukemia in a Lung Cancer Patient

Abstract

Therapy-related AML (t-AML) is one of the newly expanded disease entities in the 2008 WHO classification, accounting for 10-20% of all cases of AML, and its incidence is increasing worldwide because of improved survival rates following treatment for other primary cancers [1, 2]. Acute megakaryoblastic leukemia (AMKL) (M7) is the least common of the t-AML French-American-British (FAB) subtypes, and only two such cases have been reported to date [3, 4], neither of which was in Korea. AMKL accounts for about 7-10% of childhood AML cases (frequently associated with Down syndrome), but only about 1% of adult AML cases [5]. Here, we describe a rare case of therapy-related acute megakaryoblastic leukemia (t-AMKL) with chromosome 5 and 7 abnormalities that presented ten years after chemoradiotherapy in an elderly lung cancer patient.