Abstract

Objective: Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is an uncommon illness in and of itself. Approximately 10% of AML cases have acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL), a particularly severe form of the disease. There is a dearth of information on Turkish patients with APL. Thus, our goal was to determine the clinical, laboratory, and survival characteristics of patients with APL diagnosed within the previous 5 years at our facility.

Methods: A retrospective analysis was performed on 15 individuals who received an APL diagnosis between 2017 and 2022. IBM SPSS Statistics 25.0 was used to conduct the statistical analysis. Kaplan-Meier analysis was used for survival analysis.

Results: With a median age of 61 years, the mean age was 56.5±15.7 years. The ratio of men to women was 1.5: 1. Hypergranular variation was seen in 73.3% of our cases. Based on the risk classification, 93.3% of cases were low-risk diseases. In 40% of patients, bleeding occurred, and in 13.3%, thrombosis occurred. In total, 5 patients (33.3%) passed away and 10 patients (66.6%) survived. There was a 20% early death rate. There was a 100% rate of total remission. The medians for overall survival (OS) and event-free survival were not met; instead, they were 34.1 and 37 months, respectively. The OS rate after 1 year was 66.7%.

Conclusion: The majority of patients in our group were elderly females with low-risk illnesses. According to our research, the biggest cause of treatment failure for this normally treatable type of leukemia is early mortality.