MDS Leukemia & lymphoma??

[rondeb111]

My dad has been in and out of the hospital for the last three months. He has a foot infection that got into the bone and then he started bleeding from the bladder after he got too low on platelets. They did surgery on both and will be doing surgery on foot again this week to remove bone in his big toe. They did a CAT scan of his lungs and saw something so they did a CT scan and found enlarged lymph nodes. He just had another CT scan, this time of his stomach to see if there are enlarged lymph nodes there as well. If so they will have to do a biopsy to confirm that he has lymphoma again. Is it possible for someone to have MDS, then Leukemia and now Lymphoma? He has been running fevers as high as 103. And just told my mom today that he doesn't think he will make it much longer??? Any information would be helpful.

[Neil Cuadra]

Debbie,

Have there been any new developments?

To partially answer your question, yes, MDS can transform to Leukemia. They aren't completely distinct diseases. Each has a variety of subtypes and a range of severities. Depending on which MDS Classification method is used, the difference between a diagnosis of MDS and a diagnosis of Leukemia can be the difference between an immature cell count ("blast percentage") of 19% versus 20%.

ALL (acute lymphoblastic leukemia), CLL (chronic lymphocytic leukemia), and lymphoma are diseases of the lymphatic system, so in that way they are related.