Acute lymphoblastic leukemia is the most common malignancy in children. The most important examination at the time of diagnosis includes karyotype of leukemic cells which divides patients into prognostic groups according to cytogenetic finding. In up to 90 % of patients the chromosomal aberrations with well known clinical significance are designated. One of cytogenetic type is high hyperdiploid ALL (51-68 chromosomes) associated with favorable prognosis. Nevertheless, relapses of the disease occur even in these children. One possible reason why this happens could be an increased genomic instability of leukemic cells that causes cryptic structural rearrangements. In a retrospective study, we examined a total of 232 children with newly diagnosed B-ALL using conventional cytogenetic analyses and interphase fluorescence in situ hybridization (I-FISH) with a panel of DNA probes (Abbott Vysis) in order to detect heteroploid cells. In patients with suspect cryptic structural chromosome aberrations, we analyzed the karyotypes in detail by multicolor FISH and multicolor banding (mFISH/mBAND; MetaSystems). The extent of aberrations was determined by comparative genomic hybridization on BAC arrays (array CGH; BlueGnome). Cell clones with high hyperdiploid karyotype were detected in a total of 102 children (44 %). In...

Myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) is a clonal disease of hematopoesis resulting from damage to hematopoietic stem cells. The most common chromosomal aberration in patients with MDS is deletion of the long arms of chromosome 5, del(5q). The aim of this study is to analyse unbalanced aberrations of chromosome 5 in MDS patients, to compare the extent of 5q deletion in groups of patients with isolated del(5q) and with del(5q) in complex karyotypes, and to study the effect of the extent of del(5q) on overall survival and prognosis of the disease. We combined cytogenomic methods to examine 88 bone marrow samples from patients with MDS and del(5q) confirmed by conventional banding methods. Del(5q) was present in the karyotype as an isolated aberration in 31 patients (35,2 %), in combination with one other clonal aberration in 9 patients (10,2 %), and as part of complex karyotypes in 48 patients (54,6 %). Patients with complex karyotypes had a lower overall survival than patients with isolated del(5q). The occurrence of complex karyotypes was associated with a large extent of 5q deletion. When both the occurrence of complex karyotypes and the extent of 5q deletion were considered, only karyotype complexity had a significant effect on patients' overall survival. The extent of the deletion does not affect...