Acute leukemias in pregnant women: Results of a retrospective study at a local tertiary‐care hospital in Japan

Leukemia may rarely develop in a woman during pregnancy, posing clinical challenges to the patient, fetus, family, and medical staff managing malignancy and pregnancy. We retrospectively analyzed cases of pregnancy‐associated leukemia consecutively diagnosed and treated at a local tertiary‐care hospital in Nagano, Japan, over the past 20 years. Five cases were identified among 377,000 pregnancies in the area (one in every 75,000 pregnancies), all involving acute leukemia (three acute myelogenous leukemia [AML] and two acute lymphoblastic leukemia [ALL]). The cases were diagnosed in the first trimester (n = 1), second trimester (n = 3), or third trimester (n = 1). There were no apparent pregnancy‐associated delays in diagnosing and treating the cases. Three patients underwent induction chemotherapy during pregnancy, two of whom eventually delivered healthy babies. One of the five patients chose abortion before chemotherapy initiation. Two cases showing high‐risk features at the diagnosis (AML with an FLT3‐ITD mutation [n = 1] and relapsed ALL [n = 1]) eventually died despite consolidative allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. Our results suggested that patients with pregnancy‐associated acute leukemia can be treated similarly to nonpregnant patients, although pregnancy imposes particular clinical challenges that should be resolved with multidisciplinary care.