If you have acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), you may have questions about your prognosis (outlook). You may also see ALL survival rates online and wonder what they mean for you.
Your outlook depends on many things, including the features of your leukemia and how the disease responds to treatment. Your care team will use your test results to learn more about your ALL and plan your treatment. It’s also important to know that unlike many other cancers, ALL is both treatable and curable.
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How ALL is Classified
Most cancers are given a numbered stage based on the size of the tumor and how far the disease has spread. But because leukemia often does not form a solid tumor and is found throughout the body, there is no official staging system for ALL.
Instead, ALL is classified in the following ways:
- Newly diagnosed ALL, or untreated ALL: Treatment may have begun to relieve symptoms, such as fever and bleeding, but treatment for the leukemia has not begun.
- ALL in remission: After treatment, you may be considered in remission if your complete blood count is normal, there are no leukemia cells in your bone marrow and you have no signs or symptoms of leukemia.
- Relapsed ALL, or recurrent ALL: The leukemia has returned after going into remission.
- Refractory ALL: The leukemia has not responded to treatment.
“Our ALL team at Fred Hutch is one of only a very few clinical teams in the U.S. whose sole clinical charge is to treat this disease. ALL is both treatable and curable. So, despite what sounds like a very scary and intimidating diagnosis, ALL is something that we can make go away forever."
— Dr. Ryan Cassaday, hematologist-oncologist and ALL researcher
What Affects ALL Prognosis
Your ALL subtype and classification help your care team understand your prognosis and plan your treatment.
Your team will use your test results to determine which subtype of ALL you have. Subtypes are based on which type of lymphocyte the leukemia cells come from, how mature the cells are and whether the cells have certain chromosome changes.
Your care team will also look at how your ALL responds to treatment.
ALL Survival Rates
In cancer care, “survival rate” usually means the percentage of people expected to survive their cancer for at least five years from the time it was diagnosed. Data experts estimate this rate based on information about large groups of people with the same type of cancer. The rate doesn’t include the risk of dying during that five years for some other reason. For ALL, the relative five-year survival rate overall in the United States is 73.2%, according to the National Cancer Institute.
But the chance of surviving cancer for five years or more can be quite different from person to person. One important reason is the subtype of the disease at the time of diagnosis.
Your Fred Hutch care team can help you understand your disease and what your test results and response to treatment may mean for you.