Comparing The Prognostic Significance Of Early Predictors Of Survival In Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (Cml) Treated With Imatinib - An Analysis Of The Randomized Cml-Study Iv

Introduction: Early prediction of outcome using response-related predictive landmarks has become a major paradigm in the clinical management of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). Several studies have shown the predictive impact of 10% BCR-ABLIS at 3 and 6 months for different tyrosine kinase inhibitors. The question, which landmark should define treatment failure and determine treatment intervention has been discussed vividly. However, an objective analysis of quality criteria for different early prognostic landmarks is lacking up to now. Here we compare sensitivity, specificity and the proportion of later disease progressions predicted by 3-month and 6-month landmarks in imatinib-treated patients of the CML-study IV.