Urinary BK Virus Excretion in Children Newly Diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

Background: determining the risk factors in developing orincreasing the relapses of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (all)may help health and preventive systems to launch new programs.up to 90% of normal population changes to seropositive forbk virus by the age of 10 years. whether this oncogenic virus isresponsible for evolving all is unclear. in this study, we evaluatedthe excretion of urinary bk virus in newly diagnosed children withall compared with normal population.methods: this case–control study was carried out on 62 participants(32 all patients and 32 normal subjects), aged 1–18 years, in saintal-zahra and sayyed-al-shohada university hospitals, isfahan,iran. a polymerase chain reaction (pcr) method was used to detectthe bk virus in specimens. pcr amplification was performed usingspecific primers of pep-1 (5?-agtctttagggtcttctacc-3?)and pep-2 (5?-ggtgccaacctatggaacag-3?).results: thirty-five out of 62 participants (54.8%) were malesand the remaining were females. the mean duration of diseasewas 9.6 ± 9.69 months. central nervous system (cns) relapse wasseen in 29% of the patients. positive pcr for urine bk virus wasseen in three children with all (9.7%). no positive result forurine bkv was achieved in the control group. however, fisher’sexact test did not show any significant difference between the twogroups (p > 0.05). in addition, there was no significant correlationbetween bkv positivity and frequency of relapses.conclusion: to demonstrate the role of bk virus in inducing allor increasing the number of relapses, prospective studies on largerscale of population and evaluating both serum and urine for bk virusare recommended.