The new findings, published in the journal Blood, tie ALL to a specific infection for the first time, supporting long-held scientific suspicions that infections contribute to the development of condition.
For the study, researchers assessed the bone marrow of 127 pediatric patients diagnosed with ALL and 38 diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia for different infections. Researchers detected a significantly higher presence of CMV in bone marrow samples from children with ALL compared to the AML cohort.
For the next leg of the study, researchers examined newborn blood samples from 268 children who later developed ALL. They compared these blood samples to samples extracted from 270 healthy children and discovered the presence of congenital CMV was much higher among the ALL cohort.
The findings show children who develop ALL are 3.71 times more likely to be positive for CMV at birth. When assessing for ethnicity, researchers determined Hispanic children born with CMV to carry 5.9-fold increased risk of ALL. This particular finding holds significance because Hispanic children carry the highest risk of developing ALL.
“This is the first step, but if we do end up finding a causal link to the most common childhood cancer, we hope that will light a fire in terms of stopping mother-to-child transmission of CMV,” said lead study author Stephen Francis, PhD, assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Nevada in Reno and University of California, San Francisco. “If it’s truly that in utero CMV is one of the initiating events in the development of childhood leukemia, then control of the virus has the potential to be a prevention target. That’s the real take-home message.”
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