Newly diagnosed acute myeloid leukemia is often deemed a medical emergency, requiring urgent treatment. This is in contradiction with the need for accurate cytogenetic and molecular data, which is not immediately available, to select optimal therapy. We hypothesized that cytoreduction with hydroxyurea or cytarabine would enable urgent disease control and provide a bridge to clinical trial enrollment. We analyzed three prospective frontline clinical trials that allowed the use of cytoreduction before treatment initiation. Among 274 patients with a median age of 62 (range, 18-89), there was no significant difference in short- and long-term outcome and safety among patients who did (CytoRed) or did not receive (NoCytoRed) cytoreduction. The overall response rate in CytoRed group was 91%, compared with 86% in NoCytoRed group (p = .264). The 30- and 60-day mortality rates were 2% and 7% in CytoRed group, compared with 2% (p = .978) and 6% (p = .652) in NoCytoRed group, respectively. There was no significant difference in overall survival (OS) between in CytoRed group compared with NoCytoRed group (Hazard ratio 0.97, 95% CI 0.70-1.37, p = .879). Results were unchanged after stratification by age (< or ≥65 years) or after multivariate analyses for OS. Our data suggests that urgent cytoreduction using hydroxyurea or cytarabine is a feasible and safe approach to facilitate acquisition of complete diagnostic information prior to treatment initiation on a clinical trial.
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