We can be confident of our findings, as we had more patients to observe than did many of the earlier studies and a longer time to follow them up. Leukemia is a cancer of the infection-fighting white blood cells.
Acute leukemia progresses in a short time, compared to other forms of the disease.
The disease is the most common form of childhood leukemia, representing about 85 percent of all childhood leukemia cases. In the U.S., leukemia strikes 4.2 white children per 100,000 each year, and 2.4 black children per 100,000. For their study, the researchers recruited 188 survivors of a large treatment study of childhood leukemia. All the young women who took part in the study were at least 18 years of age. In fact, the age of menarche in the treatment group did not differ signficantly from that of the control group.