Why chemotherapy for leukemia

Patients with leukemia suffer from abnormal proliferation of leukemia cells, which leads to inhibition of normal hematopoiesis, neutropenia, anemia, and thrombocytopenia, resulting in serious infections, severe anemia, and bleeding events that can be life-threatening in severe cases. Therefore, chemotherapy is administered to leukemia patients to kill leukemia cells and reduce tumor load. If leukemia patients do not undergo chemotherapy and reduce the tumor load, the leukemia cells will only proliferate more and inhibit the normal hematopoiesis of the bone marrow even more. However, even if the leukemia patient is in the process of chemotherapy, recurrent infections, anemia and platelet reduction may occur, which require active supportive therapy to survive the myelosuppression period after chemotherapy.