[Prognosis of chronic lymphocytic leukemia: focus on recent biomarkers]

Early stages of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), which are the most frequent at diagnosis, have an extremely variable individual prognosis, as some patients remain stable for years whereas others develop aggressive forms of the disease less or more rapidly. Individual prognosis evaluation of early stages of CLL is then a challenge for physicians; also clinico-hematological stages are still the evaluation basis, numerous biological markers are helpful in providing independent information on patient prognosis. It is useful to distinguish the classical prognosis factors, described in the 1980s, and the recent markers described from the end of the 1990s, which are widely validated for certain, whereas for others further investigations are needed to confirm their prognostic impact. We propose to detail in this review these new prognostic factors of CLL, especially the different serum markers, cytogenetical abnormalities of pathologic lymphocytes, mutational status of the immunoglobulin genes (IgVH) and CD38 and ZAP-70 expression.