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Asked by anon-181914 on 22 Jun 2018.
Question: what is the main cause of blood cancer?
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Alexandra Hogan answered on 22 Jun 2018:
Blood cancer affects the white blood cells. One type of blood cancer is acute myeloid leukaemia, which is when the cells in the bone marrow produce too many immature white blood cells, which then causes problems. This type of cancer is quite rare and is more common in older people than in children. We don’t really know what causes it though.
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Claire Donald answered on 22 Jun 2018:
Blood cancer is known as Leukemia and it affects the white blood cells (immune cells that fight against invading germs). There are a few different kinds of Leukemia and they are caused by a DNA mutation in the stem cells that produce your blood cells. They produce too many white blood cells that dont fight infections properly. This also causes the numbers of red blood cells and platelets to decrease, leading to symptoms of leukemia.
Other risk factors that are involved are being obese, smoking, working with certain chemicals, exposure to radiation (for example from previous cancer treatments), having a weakened immune system (for example due to infection from HIV) or previous blood or genetic disorders.
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Ashley Akbari answered on 24 Jun 2018:
Great answers from Alex and Claire – there is lots of research ongoing into this to see if the risk factors can be identified to reduce the onset of this and other cancers, as well as improve treatments in the future.
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