Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Najean, Yves
• Lecompte, Thomas

Titel

Chronic pure thrombocytopenia in elderly patients. An aspect of the myelodysplastic syndrome

Ist Teil von

• Cancer, 1989-12, Vol.64 (12), p.2506-2510

Ort / Verlag

New York: Wiley Subscription Services, Inc., A Wiley Company

Erscheinungsjahr

1989

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• From a group of 276 elderly patients studied in the last 12 years in a department of nuclear medicine for investigating a chronic thrombocytopenia, 36 patients have an acquired disorder, with normal platelet life span, a normal megakaryocytic bone marrow count, and absence of any evident cause at the time of clinical evaluation. During the 2 to 10 subsequent years, 16 patients developed symptoms of the myelodysplastic syndrome, i.e., chronic aregenerative anemia, granulocytopenia, dysmyelopoiesis, and appearance of circulating blast cells; three of them died from acute myeloblastic leukemia. So a pure thrombocytopenia due to a platelet production defect, without any demonstrated functional platelet defect or morphologic dysmegakaryocytosis, may be a preleukemic syndrome. In the other 20 patients, with the same pure chronic thrombocytopenia, no malignant evolution has been seen with long follow‐up delays, which is often also the case in pure refractory anemias. In the absence of objective criteria of a possible premalignant disorder, the classification of these cases is difficult, which it is also the case for the so‐called refractory anemias. We suggest to individualize, in the classification of the myelodysplastic syndromes, a group of pure refractory thrombocytopenias. From a practical point of view such a diagnosis may be useful, at least to avoid inefficient and possibly harmful treatments. Cancer 64:2506–2510, 1989.