Photo by Vera Kratochvil
Newborns with congenital cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection may have an increased risk of developing acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), according to a study published in Blood.
The data also suggest the risk may be particularly high among Hispanic children.
Researchers said this is the first study to suggest that congenital CMV infection is a risk factor for childhood ALL and is more prominent in Hispanic children.
To conduct this study, the researchers first identified all known infections present in the bone marrow of 127 children diagnosed with ALL and 38 children diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML).
The team found CMV infection was prevalent in children with ALL but rare in those with AML.
Next, the researchers looked for CMV in newborn blood samples from 268 children who went on to develop ALL. The team compared the samples with samples from 270 healthy children.
“Our goal in tracking CMV back from the time of diagnosis to the womb was to establish that this infection occurred well before initiation of disease,” said lead study author Stephen Francis, PhD, of the University of Nevada and University of California, San Francisco.
He and his colleagues found that children who went on to develop ALL were nearly 4 times more likely than control subjects to be CMV-positive at birth. The odds ratio was 3.71 (P=0.0016).
The odds ratio was 5.9 in Hispanic children and 2.1 in non-Hispanic whites. The researchers said this finding is particularly interesting because of the high rate of ALL observed in Hispanics.
“If it’s true that in utero CMV is one of the initiating events in the development of childhood leukemia, then control of the virus has the potential to be a prevention target,” Dr Francis said. “That’s the real take-home message.”
While this research is in the early stages, the researchers hope these results will inspire more studies that will validate these findings and lead to the development of a CMV vaccine.
“This is the first step, but if we do end up finding a causal link to the most common childhood cancer, we hope that will light a fire in terms of stopping mother-to-child transmission of CMV,” Dr Francis said.
