Abstract
It is controversial whether acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients with 20–29% bone marrow (BM) blasts should be considered AML or myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). We retrospectively studied 382 patients, including 108 AML with 20–29% BM blasts (AML20–29), 210 AML with ≥30% BM blasts (AML ≥ 30), and 64 MDS with 10–19% BM blasts (MDS-EB2). We found that AML20–29 were more similar to MDS-EB2 in terms of advanced age, less blood count, the increased presence of poor-risk cytogenetics. The frequency of mutated genes in AML20–29 had both the characters of AML and MDS. Median overall survival of AML20–29 and MDS-EB2 were similar and shorter than those of AML ≥ 30 (p = .045). Multivariate analysis showed inferior survival with increased age, low platelet count and FLT3 mutations. Our findings suggest that AML20–29 have clinical features more similar to MDS than AML.
Potential conflict of interest
Disclosure forms provided by the authors are available with the full text of this article online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10428194.2018.1515938.