Prognosis and Prognostic Factors

Dramatic improvements in survival have been achieved for children and adolescents with cancer.[19] Between 1975 and 2020, childhood cancer mortality decreased by more than 50%.[19-21] For AML, the 5-year survival rate increased over the same time, from less than 20% to 69% for children younger than 15 years and from less than 20% to 72% for adolescents aged 15 to 19 years.[19,21]

Most contemporary comparisons also show that OS rates have improved over the past three decades for children with AML, with 5-year survival rates now in the 55% to 70% range.[21-25] Overall remission-induction rates are approximately 85% to 90%, and EFS rates from the time of diagnosis are in the 45% to 55% range.[23-26] There is, however, a wide range in outcomes for different biological subtypes of AML. After taking specific biological factors of their leukemia into account, the predicted outcome for any individual patient may be much better or much worse than the overall outcome for the general population of children with AML. For more information, see the sections on Genomics of AML and Risk Classification Systems.

Prognostic factors in childhood AML can be categorized as follows: