A 5-year-old patient from the Kovel district was admitted to the hospital at the beginning of June last year. Volyn doctors suspected a tumor because the boy was coughing hard, had a fever, and an X-ray showed a large mass in the mediastinum.
The family turned to the Western Ukrainian Specialized Children’s Medical Center, where the doctors, after further examination, changed the diagnosis. After all, the blood test showed the presence of blast cells, so it became obvious that the child has acute leukemia. One of the variants of this disease is characterized by an increase in the lymphatic glands in the chest cavity.
“The condition of the little patient was serious, it was necessary to treat it immediately. He was started chemotherapy program, which the boy successfully completed. Three stages of protocol treatment lasted 9 months and were effective. Now the patient is in remission, for some time he will receive supportive therapy (in tablet form) in an outpatient setting,” noted pediatric hematologist Olena Stepaniuk.
“When Roman’s relatives asked for help, we had already recovered from the shock of the first months of the full-scale war and had fully adapted to work in wartime. There were no such frequent alarms and we also had the necessary medicines. In addition, the patient had a standard case, which we dealt with quite often before the war, so we started treatment,” – emphasized the head of the center’s hematology department, Iryna Tsymbalyuk-Voloshyn.
As the experts of the Center noted, the chronic stress that children are under during the war weakens the immune system. Therefore, it no longer functions so effectively, which creates better conditions for the spread of malignant cells.
Currently, the hematology department still has about 25 patients from different regions: Odesa, Rivne region, Dnipropetrovsk region and Transcarpathia. Acute leukemia and lymphoma are the most frequent oncohematological pathologies in childhood.