BMC Cancer Research article BioMed Central Open Access Incidence of leukemias in children from El Salvador and Mexico City between 1996 and 2000: Population-based data Juan Manuel Mejía-Aranguré*1, Miguel Bonilla2,3, Rodolpho Lorenzana4, Servando Juárez-Ocaña1, Gladys de Reyes2, María Luisa Pérez-Saldivar1, Guadalupe González-Miranda1, Roberto Bernáldez-Ríos5, Antonio Ortiz- Fernández6, Manuel Ortega-Alvarez1, María del Carmen Martínez-García1 and Arturo Fajardo-Gutiérrez1 Address: 1Clinical Epidemiology, Pediatric Hospital, Centro Médico Nacional "Siglo XXI", Mexico City, Mexico, 2Hematology-Oncology, Hospital Nacional de Niños "Benjamín Bloom", San Salvador, El Salvador, 3Department of Pediatrics, School of Medicine, Universidad de El Salvador, San Salvador, El Salvador, 4Laboratory of Immunopathology, Guatemala City, Guatemala, 5Hematology, Pediatric Hospital, Centro Médico Nacional "Siglo XXI", Mexico City, Mexico and 6Hematology, General Hospital, Centro Médico Nacional "La Raza", Mexico City, Mexico Email: Juan Manuel Mejía-Aranguré* - jmejiaa@cis.gob.mx; Miguel Bonilla - oncologia@favivir.org.sv; Rodolpho Lorenzana - oncologia@favivir.org.sv; Servando Juárez-Ocaña - rocla04182000@yahoo.com.mx; Gladys de Reyes - oncologia@favivir.org.sv; María Luisa Pérez-Saldivar - maria_luisa_2000_mx@yahoo.com; Guadalupe González- Miranda - gpegm05@yahoo.com.mx; Roberto Bernáldez-Ríos - juan.mejiaa@imss.gob.mx; Antonio Ortiz- Fernández - juan.mejiaa@imss.gob.mx; Manuel Ortega-Alvarez - coordmedtrabajo@hotmail.com; María del Carmen Martínez- García - mcmartinezg@cis.gob.mx; Arturo Fajardo-Gutiérrez - afajardo@servidor.unam.mx * Corresponding author Published: 04 April 2005 BMC Cancer 2005, 5:33 doi:10.1186/1471-2407-5-33 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2407/5/33 Received: 07 December 2004 Accepted: 04 April 2005 © 2005 Mejía-Aranguré et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: There are very few studies that report the incidence of acute leukemias in children in Latin America. This work assesses the incidence of acute leukemias, between 1996 and 2000, in children from 0–14 years old who were attended at the Mexican Social Security Institute in Mexico City and in children from 0–11 years old in El Salvador. Methods: Design: Population-based data. Hospitals: In San Salvador, El Salvador, Hospital Nacional de Niños "Benjamín Bloom", the only center in El Salvador which attends all children, younger than 12 years, with oncologic disease. The Pediatric Hospital and the General Hospital of the Mexican Social Security Institute in Mexico City, the only centers in Mexico City which attend all those children with acute leukemia who have a right to this service. Diagnosis: All patients were diagnosed by bone marrow smear and were divided into acute lymphoid leukemia (ALL), acute myeloid leukemia (AML), chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), and unspecified leukemias (UL). The annual incidence rate (AIR) and average annual incidence rate (AAIR) were calculated per million children. Cases were stratified by age and assigned to one of four age strata: 1) <1 year; 2) 1–4 years; 3) 5–9 years, or 4) 10–14 or 10–11 years, for Mexico City and El Salvador, respectively. Results: The number of cases was 375 and 238 in El Salvador and Mexico City, respectively. AAIRs in Mexico City were 44.9, 10.6, 2.5, 0.5, and 58.4 per million children for ALL, AML, CML, UL, and total leukemias, respectively. The AAIRs in El Salvador could not be calculated because the fourth age stratum in El Salvador included children only from 0–11 years old. The incidence rates for the Page 1 of 9 (page number not for citation purposes)