Leukaemia

What is Leukaemia?

Many of you must know that there is a disease called leukaemia, but some may not know what exactly happens in this disease. Simply saying it is a cancer of the blood cells. As many of you a cancer means abnormal growth of the body tissue. In leukaemia, the abnormal growth occurs in blood cells. To understand the disease process clearly, let’s have a clear idea about the blood cells in our body.

Following are the types of blood cells present in our body.

1.      Red blood cells

2.      White blood cells

a.      Neutrophils

b.      Eosinophils

c.       Basophils

d.      Lymphocytes

e.      Monocytes

3.      Platelets

All these cells are produced in the bone marrow. Bone marrow, as the name implies is placed within the bones. The following simple picture showing the structure of the bone will help you to understand it more clearly. Many of us think that bones are hard structure with no cavity, but it is wrong. There are small cavities within each bones and within those cavities lie the cells which divide (proliferate) and produce blood cells.

 Even though there are several types of blood cells, all of them originate from a single type of cell. They are called pluripotential cells. This mother cell is not like the daughter cells. The mother cells proliferate and produce daughter cells. The initial these first set of daughter cells are a little different from the mother cell. Like vise the daughter cells also divide and produce more cells. This process is called cell differentiation. These new cells also differ from the mother cell and from each other. This process keeps on happening till the final matured blood cells are produced. The more detailed outline of this process is illustrated in the following diagram.

 So, when the dividing process of these cells happens in an uncontrolled way, so the above mentioned maturation process does not occur. This results in filling the bone marrow with a lot of undifferentiated or abnormally differentiated blood cells. Then these abnormal blood cells are released in to the blood stream. Finally the bones get defected and the blood becomes unable to perform its functions correctly as its containing blood cells are defective.