Leukemia

It’s called the river of life, the gallons of blood that stream through our miles of torturous arteries, veins and capillaries. Because of bloods extreme importance to life, any injury to it may have serious consequences. Blood contains many specific functions, red blood cells transport oxygen from the lungs to other body tissues, white blood cells are necessary to fight off diseases, and tinyelements called platelets aid in forming clots. Your white blood cells are potent infection fighters, when healthy; these cells grow and divide in an orderly fashion as your body needs them. Cancer is a devastating disease that hits many families and people of all ages, a very destructive form of cancer in the blood is Leukemia. In leukemia, your bone marrow, the soft tissue inside most bones,produces a large number of immature, abnormal white blood cells that do not function properly. These abnormal cells multiply in significant amounts and crowd the bone marrow. As they move further into the body they can collect in different places. Leukemia is a malignant disease; the two most common types are acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and acute myelogenous leukemia. Fortunately over the years,many improvements in research have helped doctors develop treatments that have improved the prognosis of many patients trying to overcome this cancer.
The ancient Greeks are widely credited with being the first to recognize cancer. The Greek word “leukos” means blood and “hemia” means white, and it actually stands for excess of white blood cells in the human body. They were the first todiscover this cancer during the 14th or 15th century, but it was not officially discovered until 1845, when John Hughes Bennett diagnosed it in Edinburgh, Scotland. Although cancer was much less common before the 20th century, humans have been getting cancer for a long time. Some explanations for the increase during the 20th century are that more people are surviving who would have died of infectiousdisease, and that in the past many times cancer may not have been properly diagnosed (Greaves). Physicians first began recognizing that certain factors could augment the risk of developing cancer. One of the most common treatments back then for leukemia was arsenics. Thomas Fowler, from Stanford, England, created an arsenic solution. It was a combination of potassium bicarbonate and arsenictrioxide and became known as Fowler’s Solution. This arsenic solution was used as a standard remedy to treat leukemia, among a few other blood related diseases (Nelson). Arsenics became the primary therapy for leukemia, until radiation was discovered as to being even more effective. After medical investigation, it was discovered that daily doses of radiation could reduce the size of tumors andimprove therapeutic response. The only downside of this system was that short after becoming very popular, radiation was shown to be a cause as well as a cure to any type of cancer. The American Cancer Society explained briefly about how radiation therapy was discovered to also cause cancer stating, “Many early radiologists used the skin of their arms to test the strength of radiation from theirradiotherapy machines, looking for a dose that would produce a pink reaction (erythema) that looked like sunburn. This was considered an accurate measure of the dose, called the erythema dose. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, many of these early radiologists came down with leukemia (American Cancer Society). It wasn’t until after World War II that there were no adequate treatments for leukemia. Oneof the most important treatments for cancer now is chemotherapy. It developed from a chemical warfare used by the Germans named mustard gas. This gas attacked rapidly-dividing white blood cells. As a result, physicians started preparing trials to test how it worked intravenously. They used it to treat late-stage lymphomas and found that dramatic results came quite early and were remarkable....