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S E Parish

Publications and source records attributed to S E Parish.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Features affecting outcome during remission induction of acute myeloid leukaemia in 619 adult patients.

Six hundred and nineteen patients with de novo acute myeloid leukaemia, entered into the Medical Research Council's eighth trial of therapy have been studied. All patients were treated with the same remission induction regimen. Pretreatment variables comprising age, clinical status, haematological status and a detailed marrow cytology and cytochemistry score have been analysed. Poorer remission rates have been found in older patients, in those with lower Karnofsky scores and in patients with a platelet count of less than 25 X 10(9)/l. Leukaemias showing evidence of cytoplasmic maturation along the granulocyte and monocyte lines, as evidenced by granules, Auer rods, a high percentage of Sudan black positive blast cells and morphological and cytochemical abnormalities of neutrophils were associated with a higher remission rate. Marrow eosinophilia was a good prognostic feature. Nuclear features of immaturity, i.e. increasing numbers and prominence of nucleoli were associated with a low remission rate. Abnormalities of the erythroid series, notably Periodic acid-Schiff positivity which was present in 133 cases (22% of the total), was associated with a low remission rate. Patient age and pretreatment Karnofsky score were the most useful predictors of treatment outcome.

Adolescent

There is no such thing as ageing, and cancer is not related to it.

Several separate cellular processes have to accumulate in a normal cell to alter it into the seed of a growing carcinoma. Even though cancer is much commoner in the old than in the young, there is no good evidence whatever that these separate processes have any systematic tendency to take place more readily among old than among young adults. (Indeed, there are some instances in which carcinogenic treatments actually elicit cancer less rapidly among the old!) There are obvious evolutionary reasons why substantial cancer risks should be delayed until the end of the usual lifespan, and it appears that this is achieved chiefly not by having the component processes of neoplastic transformation themselves particularly dependent on age, but simply by requiring not one, but several, of them en route from full normality to full malignancy, and by giving at least some of them an extraordinarily low daily probability. The daily probabilities of these separate events are, of course, under evolutionary influence, and some of them appear to have changed by orders of magnitude over the tens of millions of years of evolution that separate humanity from various short-lived animals.

Adult