Answers to Top Questions About ALL
- ALL is very rarely a hereditary disease.
- It’s most often caused by a quiet mutation.
- ALL grows very quickly, so treatment is vital.
He says many times people worry that they might pass the disease on to their children and wonder how they got it in the first place. He says in most causes it's a quiet mutation that causes the leukemia.
Read More Related: A TikTok User Who is "Trying to Make Cancer Cool" Beats Leukemia Three Times; Inspires His Nearly 100,000 Followers "It is often not something that is heritable," Dr. Oluwole tells SurvivorNet. "If there happens to be a pattern in a certain family, many times that may be maybe because they were in the same environment. ‘I got exposed to the same thing, right?’ So it is not necessarily something that is heritable or like some of the other cancers, some of the other genes that we know about things like breast cancerALL is not like that.” He said another question he hears frequently is what if people do nothing after a diagnosis. The answer is grim.
"The ALL grows very, very fast. If we don’t do anything, it will cause somebody to die within a few weeks,” Dr. Oluwole says.
As for support after such a life-changing diagnosis, he says there are trained professionals such as have case managers and hospital navigators exist to aid people through their cancer journeys.
“Cancer is a really life-changing diagnosis and we would like our patients to know that don’t have to feel as if they are on their own,” Dr. Oluwole says.
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