Leukemia Death, Survival Trends Are Improving in the Era of Targeted Treatment

Leukemia is one of the more commonly diagnosed forms of cancer, but mortality rates are declining and five-year survival rate are lengthening, according to cancer statistics published today by the American Cancer Society.

Mortality rates in children and adolescents have been declining since the mid-1970s, according to the cancer society’s Cancer Facts & Figures 2024 report. Among adults, the decline started in mid-1990s.

Trends in incidence (the number of new cases) have been more complicated: level in children, increasing by 1% per year among adolescents, and declining recently among adults after increasing in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Rebecca L. Siegel, M.P.H.

Leukemia has seen some of the most significant advances in cancer treatment. The FDA approval of Gleevec (imatinib) as a treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia ushered in a new era of more effective, targeted therapy. In a companion article to the facts and figures report published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians today, Rebecca Siegel, M.P.H., an epidemiologist and senior scientific director of surveillance research at the cancer society, and colleagues said the five-year relative survival rate for chronic myeloid leukemia has more than tripled from 22% in the mid-1970s to 70% during the 2013-2019 time period. They noted that three generations of the class of drugs that Gleevec pioneered, called tyrosine kinase inhibitors, have been approved. Resistance to the drugs and the worsening of the disease occurs in 5% to 10% of patients, they wrote in CA and is an active area of research.

Based on incidence data through 2020 and mortality data through 2021, Siegel and her colleagues project that there will be 62,770 new cases of leukemia will be diagnosed in 2024 and 23,670 deaths. Leukemia is not a rare, exotic form of cancer, but it accounts for a fairly small fraction of cancer cases and deaths. Just over 3.1% of the 2,001,140 new cases of cancer projected to be diagnosed in 2024 will be leukemia and 3.9% of the 611,720 cancer deaths that are projected to occur this year will be caused by the disease.

This table shows the projected 2024 incidence and deaths from the four main types of leukemia.

Source: Cancer statistics, Siegel RL,Glaquinto AN,Jemal A, CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, January 2024.

For the purposes of the facts and figures report, the cancer society classifies chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) as a type of leukemia but, chronic lymphocytic leukemia is the same as small lymphocytic lymphoma (SLL), a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. As a result, CLL is sometimes referred to as CLL/SLL.

Leukemia is a relatively rare cancer among adults, but it is the most common childhood (birth to age 14) cancer, accounting for 28% of cases. Siegel and her colleagues projected that there will be 9,620 children diagnosed with cancer this year and 1,040 will die from the disease.