To receive the best available treatment, it is essential that a child with leukemia be treated at a pediatric medical center by board-certified pediatric oncologists with extensive experience treating your child’s type of leukemia. For most children, treatment begins within days (sometimes hours) of diagnosis and requires aggressive supportive care. The goal of treatment is to achieve complete remission by killing all cancer cells as quickly as possible.

Treatment of childhood leukemia includes one or more of the following:

• Chemotherapy and other medications (see Chapter 13)
• Radiation therapy (see Chapter 15)
• Stem cell transplantation (see Chapter 16)

Treatment for children with leukemia begins with a course of chemotherapy, usually involving several different drugs in carefully controlled combinations. For most children, the only treatment is chemotherapy that lasts for many months or years. For certain leukemias, a stem cell transplant is done after one or more courses of chemotherapy. Doctors try to avoid radiation therapy because of the potential for permanent damage. Radiation is normally used only when leukemia cells are found in the cerebrospinal fluid or testes at diagnosis, if the child is at very high risk of central nervous system relapse, or prior to a stem cell transplant (SCT).