2. Susceptibility to Infections
With leukemia, there is an aberrant production of blood cells, and in some cases, you would have a deficiency in white blood cells and their immune function. There’s a very high chance that patients with leukemia develop various infections in the respiratory tract and even bacteremia (bacteria traveling through the blood vessels).
In a study about infections in patients diagnosed with leukemia, most patients were diagnosed with mild and treatable infections. However, if they also had an abnormal decrease in the granulocyte count (one subtype of blood cells), there was a high chance they had life-threatening bacteremia.
