Abstract

Disease relapse still greatly interferes with the success of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). This study retrospectively evaluated the long-term safety and efficacy of a conditioning regimen consisting of total body irradiation (TBI; 12 Gy), cyclophosphamide (CY; 60 mg kg(-1) , two doses), and high-dose cytarabine (Ara-C; 2 g m(-2) ; four doses) for patients with ALL. Fifty-five patients (median age: 31-years old) were evaluated. Stem cells were from human leukocyte antigen-identical siblings in 22 patients and from alternative donors in 33. There were no cases of early death before engraftment, and 100-day transplant-related mortality was 7.3%. With a median follow-up period of 9.6 years, 5-year overall and disease-free survival were 63.2% (95% CI: 46.5-79.9%) and 63.6% (95% CI: 47.1-80.1%) in patients with complete remission, respectively, both of which were significantly higher than the values of 27.3% (95% CI: 8.7-46.0%) and 22.7% (95% CI: 5.3-40.1%) for patients in advanced stages (P < 0.01). These results suggest that TBI and CY (TBI-CY) plus Ara-C could be a feasible and effective conditioning regimen for adult patients with ALL both in remission and in advanced stages, and a future study to compare this combination therapy with TBI-CY is required.

Copyright © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.