Clinical significance of central nervous system involvement at diagnosis of childhood t-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia

Background Patients with T‐cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T‐ALL) frequently present with unfavorable features at diagnosis. Therefore, they are considered to have a higher risk to relapse. We sought to correlate initial central nervous system (CNS) disease at diagnosis with shortened survival in childhood T‐ALL. Procedure A retrospective analysis of 48 children with T‐ALL was performed. The group consisted of 32 boys and 16 girls whose median age was 8 years. Their CNS status was classified as CNS‐1 (no blast cells in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF); n = 44), CNS‐2 (