VIDEO: Potential causes, risk factors for CLL

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We don't really have a good idea of what quote unquote causes CLL and by that I mean when a patient comes into my clinic and asks me like, "What did I do wrong?" or, "Why did I get this?" I don't know the answer. This is not a cancer that's associated with like exposure to a certain toxin like cigarette smoke or something of the like. So we know it's connected with aging. Average age is 70. Some type of insult or multiple insults occurs on the DNA of the B lymphocyte as the patient ages.

We do recognize certain chromosomal aberrations that occur at high frequency and we can look for those to give us some information about the cancer itself. But the patients, you know, genes that they were born with, they weren't born with some genetic problem that ultimately led them to have CLL. Only in a rare set of circumstances is there what we would identify a familial cohort of CLL patients and there really isn't a recognized gene that you can detect for that.