The incidence of one or other rearrangement in chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) patients varies in different reported series. In this study we report the frequencies of BCR-ABL1 fusion transcript variants studied in 43 CML patients from Sudan. The study includes 46 Sudanese patients, three of which negative for the BCR-ABL1 fusion transcript. More than half of 43 positive patients showed b2a2 fusion transcript (53.5%), while (41.9%) showed b3a2 transcript and the remaining (4.6%) coexpression of b3a2/ b2a2 and b3a2/b2a2/e19a2. We detected neither coexpression of p210/p190 nor e1a2 alone. Male patients showed a tendency to express b2a2, while female tende to express b3a2 (p = 0.017). Moreover, a single nucleotide polymorphism was detected in BCR exon 13 in one out of four patients and this patient showed only b2a2 expression. In conclusion, we observed a significant correlation between sex and type of BCR-ABL1 transcript, an observation that deserves further investigation.

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