The two most commonly used classification schemata for AML, are the older French-American-British (FAB) system and the newer World Health Organization (WHO) system.
World Health Organization
The World Health Organization (WHO) classification of acute myeloid leukemia attempts to be more clinically useful and to produce more meaningful prognostic information than the FAB criteria. Each of the WHO categories contains numerous descriptive sub-categories of interest to the hematopathologist and oncologist; however, most of the clinically significant information in the WHO schema is communicated via categorization into one of the subtypes listed below.
The WHO subtypes of AML are:
| Type | Name | Cytogenetics |
|---|
| M0 | minimally differentiated acute myeloblastic leukemia | |
| M1 | acute myeloblastic leukemia | |
| M2 | acute myeloblastic leukemia | t(8;21)(q22;q22), t(6;9) |
| M3 | promyelocytic, or acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL) | t(15;17) |
| M4 | acute myelomonocytic leukemia | inv(16)(p13q22), del(16q) |
| M4eo | myelomonocytic together with bone marrow eosinophilia | inv(16), t(16;16) |
| M5 | acute monoblastic leukemia (M5a) or acute monocytic leukemia (M5b) | del (11q), t(9;11), t(11;19) |
| M6 | acute erythroid leukemias, including erythroleukemia (M6a) and very rare pure erythroid leukemia (M6b) | |
| M7 | acute megakaryoblastic leukemia | t(1;22) |
| M8 | acute basophilic leukemia |
Uncommon phenotypes of acute myeloid leukemia
The morphologic subtypes of AML include many exceedingly rare types not included in the FAB system. All of them except acute myeloid dendritic cell leukemia acute eosinophilic leukemia and are included in the WHO classification (see below). The following list shows these subtypes.
- Acute basophilic leukemia
- Acute eosinophilic leukemia
- Mast cell leukemia
- Acute myeloid dendritic cell leukemia
- Acute panmyelosis with myelofibrosis
- Myeloid sarcoma.
Further Reading
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"Acute myeloid leukemia"
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