Overview of leukemia

[Jessica]

Leukemias are cancers of white blood cells or of cells that develop into white blood cells.
White blood cells develop from stem cells in the bone marrow. Sometimes the development goes awry, and pieces of chromosomes get rearranged. The resulting abnormal chromosomes interfere with normal control of cell division, so that affected cells multiply uncontrollably or are resistant to normal cell death, resulting in leukemia.