[High-dose Ara-C treatment of acute leukemia]

High-dose cytosine arobinoside (HDAra-C) was originally introduced in clinical hematology for the treatment of refractory or relapsed acute leukemia. Recently, however, this treatment has been tried for remission induction and/or consolidation in early leukemia cases, and resulted in a fairly percentage of long-term survival cases. HDAra-C in combination with anthracyclines is now considered to be a treatment which may afford some hope of a cure in a certain percentage of cases of adult acute non-lymphocytic leukemia. This treatment also has the advantage of being an effective treatment for meningeal leukemia, since a high concentration of Ara-C effective enough to kill leukemic cells is maintained in the cerebrospinal fluid after intravenous infusion of high-dose Ara-C. In this paper, the HDAra-C treatment of acute leukemia is reviewed and the results of our group study on the treatment of 30 cases of refractory acute leukemia with HDAra-C are discussed.