Banding Karyotyping From Peripheral Blood Is a Useful Method for the Diagnostic Workup of Myelodysplastic Neoplasia and CMML.

This retrospective study involving 155 patients from the Düsseldorf MDS Registry compared cytogenetic banding from peripheral blood (PB) and bone marrow (BM) in patients with myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) and chronic myelomonocytic leukemia (CMML). For 63 of these patients, paired PB and BM cytogenetic analyses were available that were conducted no more than 3 months apart. Concordant ISCN results were found in 81%, with no significant differences in the total number of metaphases or aberrant metaphases between PB and BM. Furthermore, IPSS-R/-M scorings, derived from PB and BM, turned out to be comparable, with only 7 out of 63 patients classified into a different cytogenetic risk category. This implies that aberrant clones are not underrepresented in PB and that cytogenetic findings from PB can reliably reflect those obtained from BM.