• For patients with unusually high platelet counts (over 1 million/cmm.) and unable to be controlled with the
standard palliative chemotherapy , the drug Anagrelide seems to be useful.
Bone Marrow Transplantation All patients under 50 should be tissue-typed along with their immediate family members to determine if there is a relative who could be a marrow donor. If there is, then an allogeneic marrow transplant should be considered. In some institutions patients under 60 would still be considered for marrow transplantation.
The current consensus is that a marrow transplant should be performed within two years of diagnosis. Transplants further from diagnosis have been performed, but preliminary results have not been as good as when transplants were performed earlier in the course of the disease.
Again, marrow transplantation is the only treatment that offers the chance of a cure to CML patients. There is a 20 percent probability that a transplant patient may die during or shortly after the transplant from a variety of problems—infections, graft rejection, graft-versus-host (GVH) problems, lung complications and bleeding. Patients who survive the procedure are also susceptible to a recurrence of the disease.
