[Correspondence] Do cytogenetics of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia blasts affect required duration and intensity of maintenance therapy? – Authors' reply

We thank Ravi Shah for his interest in our report1 describing a linear association between DNA-incorporated thioguanine nucleotides (DNA-TGN) level and risk of relapse among non-high-risk children with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. We did not include karyotypes as covariates in the analyses, because the 5-year relapse rate for patients with ETV6/RUNX-translocation (seven relapses in 246 patients) was only 3·8% (95% CI 0·9–6·6), whereas it was 4·0% (1·5–6·4) for patients with a high-hyperdiploid clone (ten relapses in 326 patients), which precluded reliable conclusions.

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