What causes chronic leukemia?
Chronic leukaemias are caused by similar mechanisms to those that cause the acute leukaemias. It usually involves a mutation or a defect in the genetic material of the stem cells in the bone marrow. I think the general outline is that any particular haematologic malignancy can be caused by damage to the stem cell. Whether it’s the primordial stem cell that leads to the production of every single cell in your body, or the particular cell that leads to the white blood cell formatinon, or the stem cell that leads to the red blood cell formation; in any case it’s damage to a precusor cell that ultimately leads to the production of an abnormal population, or abnormal set of cells, that don’t do the right job for your body.
