Prognostic impact of lipid profile in adult Egyptian acute leukemia patients

Introduction: Acute leukemia is a malignant disorder which results from clonal proliferation of lymphoid and myeloid blast cells. Several studies have reported changes in lipid metabolism at the time of diagnosis of leukemia. Although investigators have reported decreased total cholesterol, decreased high-density lipoprotein, and elevated triglyceride (TG) in leukemic patients, there is a lack of agreement about these changes among different types of leukemia and between children and adult patients, in addition to different data about their impacts on prognosis. In this study, lipid profile has been examined at the time of diagnosis of acute leukemia in order to correlate it with response to therapy. Material and methods: This is a prospective study carried out at the Oncology Center at Mansoura University, Egypt between 2018 and 2019. Fifty patients newly diagnosed with de novo acute leukemia were included. Thirty-four patients were diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) (68%), while 16 patients were diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) (32%). Lipid profile and body mass index (BMI) data was obtained. Results: Overweight/obese patients showed a more statistically significant association with female patients than with male patients (p = 0.009). By comparing the lipid profile between overweight/obese patients and other patients, there was no statistically significant association. 76.7% of AML patients were overweight or obese (p = 0.015), and 81.3% of ALL patients showed hypertriglyceridemia (p = 0.014). There was no statistically significant association between lipid profile and complete response (CR) rate; however, there was a marginally significant association between non-CR rate and overweight and obese patients (p = 0.051). In addition, there was no impact of BMI or lipid profile on overall survival among acute leukemia patients. Conclusions: Female, and acute myeloid leukemia, patients were more commonly associated with overweight and obesity, and high TG level was found to be associated with acute lymphoid leukemia. Changes in lipid profile showed no impact on complete response rate or on overall survival in acute leukemia patients