Cancer Health Center

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Recurrent Childhood Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

Standard treatment of recurrent childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) for leukemia that comes back in the bone marrow may include the following:

• Combination chemotherapy.
• Chemotherapy with or without total-body irradiation followed by a stem cell transplant, using stem cells from a donor.

Standard treatment of recurrent childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) for leukemia that comes back outside the bone marrow may include the following:

• Chemotherapy and radiation therapy for cancer that comes back in the testicles only.
• Combination chemotherapy and intrathecal chemotherapy with radiation therapy to the brain and/or spinal cord for cancer that comes back in the brain and spinal cord only.

Some of the treatments being studied in clinical trials for recurrent childhood ALL include the following:

• Combination chemotherapy and targeted therapy with a monoclonal antibody .
• New anticancer drugs and new combination chemotherapy treatments.
• Combination chemotherapy and new kinds of targeted therapies.

Check for U.S. clinical trials from NCI's list of cancer clinical trials that are now accepting patients with recurrent childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia. For more specific results, refine the search by using other search features, such as the location of the trial, the type of treatment, or the name of the drug. General information about clinical trials is available from the NCI Web site.