High prognostic impact of flow cytometric minimal residual disease detection in acute myeloid leukemia: data from the HOVON/SAKK AML 42A study.

Purpose: Half the patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) who achieve complete remission (CR), ultimately relapse. Residual treatment-surviving leukemia is considered responsible for the outgrowth of AML. In many retrospective studies, detection of minimal residual disease (MRD) has been shown to enable identification of these poor-outcome patients by showing its independent prognostic impact.