Copy-number alterations correlate to high-risk genomic aberrations and survival in chronic lymphocytic leukemia

Large but not small copy-number alterations correlate to high-risk genomic aberrations and survival in chronic lymphocytic leukemia: a high-resolution genomic screening of newly diagnosed patients. Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-arrays allow simultaneous detection of copy-number aberrations (CNAs) and copy-number neutral loss-of-heterozygosity (CNN-LOH). In this study we investigated the presence of CNAs and CNN-LOH in newly diagnosed CLL samples from a Swedish chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) cohort. In this study we could detect the known recurrent aberrations in CLL (i.e. deletions of 13q, 11q, 17p and trisomy 12). We also detected other both large and small CNAs which were mostly non-recurrent. CNN-LOH was detected on chromosome 13q in patients that carried homozygous deletion of 13q. In this study, we applied 250K SNP-arrays and screened samples from 203 newly diagnosed chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) patients from a population-based Scandinavian cohort. All samples contained >70% CLL cells.