JOHN D. HAINSWORTH, MD: We don't know what causes it. It's a disease that happens more frequently with increasing age. This is the only leukemia that's actually the most common in elderly patients. It's uncommon in patients younger than 50 years old.
MARYANN BIRD: What exactly happens when patients get CLL?
JOHN D. HAINSWORTH, MD: CLL, like any kind of cancer, involves a proliferation -- an abnormal proliferation of the cell that's the cancer cell. But in general, the big problems in this kind of cancer come when the bone marrow gets too full of these lymphocytes, and they start to affect the bone marrow's ability to do its normal functions, which are to produce other blood cells.
MARYANN BIRD: What are the signs or symptoms of this disease?
JOHN D. HAINSWORTH, MD: This is a disease that probably presents in one of three major ways. In this country, probably the most common way that people get diagnosed is that they go to their doctor for something else. And on a blood test, they're found to have a high white blood count level. And that leads to other tests, and then they get diagnosed. So often they're asymptomatic.
The second most common is probably that they feel some enlarged lymph nodes. And often that's fairly diffuse. They can feel them in the neck, under the arms, in the groin.
The third way -- and this is also fairly common -- is that they develop fatigue. The fatigue is basically from anemia, and that's -- that's as a result of the bone marrow infiltration that I mentioned before.
MARYANN BIRD: Is there a cure for CLL?
