I know no one wants any more hot takes on more negative things COVID could do but I've been thinking about how, COVID might cause an increase in Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia, particularly In children... 1/n
So Mel Greave's wrote this amazing review paper where he puts together how ALL develops. It showed that about 1% of babies are born with a precancerous mutation. However, a lot less go on to get blood cancer 2/n
The evidence suggests that what determines if these babies go on to have ALL is various environmental factors. One of these factors is exposure to infection. But the timing of this infections exposure is very important 3/n
Children who are exposed to certain infectious agents early in their life appear to be protected. While those who are exposed later on are at an increased risk. This is called the delayed infection hypothesis and there's pretty convincing evidence for it 4/n
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