Navigating acute myeloid leukemia towards better outcomes: Treatment pathways and challenges for patients ineligible for intensive chemotherapy

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is an aggressive hematologic malignancy that affects primarily older individuals. Patients ineligible to receive intensive standard chemotherapy followed by consolidation with/without hematopoietic stem cell transplant have a suboptimal prognosis. In recent years, significant advances have been made in the AML field leading to the development of new anti-leukemic approaches, including lower-intensity therapies specifically developed for patients who are ineligible for intensive chemotherapy. As the available options for this hard-to-manage and historically undertreated patient category are increasing, selecting the best treatment for each patient is crucial and ever more challenging. Accordingly, accurate patient evaluation is required to guide this decision-making process. There is currently no consensus on how to evaluate patients' fitness status, and the available tools that were originally developed for this purpose might not be adequate in the setting of the new treatment options. In this review we describe current management of AML patients unfit for intensive chemotherapy, aiming to highlight current challenges and suggest possible strategies for an accurate therapeutic selection. For this purpose, we will first provide an overview of epidemiology and classification of AML, and then move to current anti-leukemic treatments for unfit patients and the tools used for evaluating patient eligibility for a specific treatment. Finally, we will suggest possible measures to improve the management of AML patients in the era of novel lower-intensity regimens.