Leukaemia and Pregnancy

A PubMed search was undertaken using the grouped key words “leukaemia; pregnancy”: 3,067 references were found, with the earliest (a case report in a Dutch journal) published in 1949 [1]. Only papers with clinical data were considered for this review, with the selection arbitrarily focussing on more recent papers; the majority of these were single case reports. Special consideration was given to case series (all of them retrospective in design). For obvious reasons, in this particular field no prospective series or randomised trials are reported in the literature. More recent literature was deliberately given preference over articles published before the 1980s, since some of the major advances in diagnosis and therapy of leukaemia were achieved as of the early 1990s.