Abstract
Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is the most common form of adult leukemia in the United States and Europe and accounts for approx 25% of all leukemias in those regions. Patients with CLL are often asymptomatic at presentation, and the disease is discovered on routine examination. The course of the disease is heterogeneous: a subset of patients will have indolent disease, may never require therapy, and may eventually die of unrelated causes; another subset will have aggressive disease and will survive for only a few years despite treatment. In most patients, the disease will have an intermediate clinical behavior, with slowly increasing leukocytosis and progressive lymphadenopathy and organomegaly, and patients will require treatment at some point. (More details on the epidemiology and clinical presentation of CLL are described in other chapters of this textbook).
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Ferrajoli, A., Keating, M.J., O’Brien, S.M. (2004). Chemotherapy of Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. In: Faguet, G.B. (eds) Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. Contemporary Hematology. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-59259-412-2_13
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