Key differences from the 2011 diagnostic recommendations included: lower threshold values for hemoglobin and hematocrit and bone marrow examination for diagnosis of polycythemia vera (PV), according to the revised WHO criteria; the search for complementary clonal markers, such as ASXL1, EZH2, IDH1/IDH2, and SRSF2 for the diagnosis of myelofibrosis (MF) in patients who test negative for JAK2V617, CALR or MPL driver mutations.
Contrarily, DNA methylation genes (DNMT3A, IDH1, IDH2 and TET2) were mutated most often in PV (0·5) and less frequently in ET (0·23) and PMF (0·20), but without reaching statistical significance.
We have studied the mutational status of TET2 (complete coding region), ASXL1 (exon12), IDH1 (R132), IDH2 (R140 and R172), and c-CBL (exons 8 and 9) in 62 MPN patients (52 essential thrombocythemia (ET), five polycythemia vera (PV), and five primary myelofibrosis (PMF)) negative for both JAK2 (V617F and exon 12) and MPL (exon 10) mutations.
We investigated a group of pediatric patients diagnosed either with essential thrombocythemia (ET; N = 9) or polycythemia vera (PV; N = 4) according to WHO criteria (median age = 10 years; range 1.5-15 years) in whom direct sequencing was performed for the existence of genetic alterations in JAK2, MPL, TET2, ASXL1, CBL, IDH1, and IDH2.