Refractory means that the leukemia failed to go into remission following treatment. Your child's treatment will often be planned by a team of childhood cancer specialists with experience and expertise in treating leukemias of childhood. The primary treatment for AML is chemotherapy, sometimes followed by bone marrow transplantation. Radiation therapy may be used in certain cases. Biological therapy is also being studied in clinical trials.
Chemotherapy is the use of drugs to kill cancer cells.
Chemotherapy is called a systemic treatment because the drug enters the bloodstream, travels through the body, and can kill cancer cells throughout the body. Bone marrow transplantation, a newer type of treatment, is used to replace the patient's bone marrow with healthy bone marrow. First, high doses of chemotherapy with or without radiation therapy are given to destroy all of the bone marrow in the body. The healthy marrow from the donor is given to the patient through a needle in a vein, and the healthy marrow replaces the marrow that was destroyed. A bone marrow transplant using marrow from a relative or person not related is called an allogeneic bone marrow transplant.