Early infection tied to leukemia risk in childhood

NEW YORK, Mar 13 (Reuters) The chances of children being diagnosed with leukemia seem to be related to the number of infections they had in their first year of life, research from the UK suggests.

Dr Eve Roman from the University of York and colleagues identified 455 children with leukemia diagnosed between 2 and 5 years of age, and found that 425 of them had a type called acute lymphoblastic leukemia or ALL.

According to the researchers' report in the American Journal of Epidemiology, children diagnosed with ALL had significantly more infectious episodes in infancy than did a comparison group of matched ''controls'' without leukemia.

The average number of episodes was 3.6 for children with ALL, versus 3.1 for controls. Overall, 24 per cent of ALL children and 18 per cent of controls were diagnosed with at least one infection during the first month of life, and by the end of their first year of life this figure had risen to 88 per cent of ALL patients and 85 per cent among controls.

Children with ALL ''who had more than one neonatal infectious episode tended to be diagnosed with ALL at a comparatively young age,'' the investigators found. The average age when ALL was diagnosed was 38 months for children with two or more episodes of infection in the newborn period, compared to 45 months for kids with only one episode or none.

Roman and her colleagues conclude that ''early infection is positively associated with early-onset ALL.'' They say the findings support the theory that ''a dysregulated immune response to infection in the first few months of life'' promotes the development of ALL later in childhood.

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