A discovery of nonrandom recurrent interstitial aberration at the long arm of chromosome 5 was made by Van den Berghe et al. in 1974. For a long time, this entity was classified as myelodysplastic ...syndrome (MDS). Meanwhile, its definition as well as classification criteria were repeatedly changed due to both clinical studies and advances in new techniques. In particular an insufficiency of ribosome-forming protein (RPS14) gene was found soon after similar gene RPS19 discovery in patients with severe inherited Diamond-Blackfan anemia (DBA). It cannot be excluded that basic pathogenetic mechanisms, including participation of activated gene TP53, seem to be similar in both entities.
This article for the first time presents the quantitative data on the BAALC expression in the majority (25/31) of patients tested with 5q- deletions to be under the cut-off values. It concerns a group of 14/16 patients with isolated 5q- anomaly, and 11 other cases in whom 5q- deletion was combined with additional non-identical chromosomal aberrations. On the contrary, this molecular parameter exceeded the cut-off levels in all (n=10) MDS patients without 5q- abnormality. Hence, these data might effectively support an assumption of a ribosomopathy in cases of isolated 5q- deletion. Since about 8-10 % of these patients are transformed into MDS and/or secondary AML, a possible exclusion of isolated 5q- deletion syndrome from MDS category should be discussed carefully and this assumption is needed an additional support in larger studies.
Favorable prognostic significance of sole trisomy 8 and its associations with additional chromosome aberrations was confirmed in 7 adult and 3 pediatric patients with myelodysplastic syndromes ...treated with hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). The group of comparison included 10 MDS patients with sole monosomy 7 or 5 chromosome and those within complex karyotypes (CK). Cytogenetic investigations were carried out according to standard GTG and multi-colored fluorescence in situ hybridization (mFISH) techniques. Our data revealed significant difference in overall survival (OS) between the tested and control groups (p=0.045) thus being additional argument reinforcing the concept of favorable prognosis of trisomy 8 in HSCT-treated MDS patients. Eight of ten patients (5 with sole trisomy 8 and three with more complex karyotypes) are alive. Of the deceased patients, one had CK trisomy 8 was associated with poor-prognostic monosomy 7. In accordance with experimental findings Sloand et al., 2007, this favorable effect of trisomy 8 in MDS patients might be linked with inhibition of programmed cell death with anti-apoptotic proteins, including myc, which are activated in these cases and needs additional in-depth studies.
