Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is relatively rare. It accounts for roughly 1% of all new cancer diagnoses in the United States each year, with an estimated 20,000 to 21,000 new cases annually. While those numbers make it uncommon compared to cancers of the breast, lung, or colon, AML is the most common type of acute leukemia in adults.
Who Gets AML Most Often
AML is overwhelmingly a disease of older adults. The median age at diagnosis is 70, meaning half of all people diagnosed are older than that. About 62% of cases occur in adults over age 65, with the heaviest concentration in two age brackets: 65 to 74 (26.6% of cases) and 75 to 84 (24.9% of cases). Another 10.5% of diagnoses happen in people 85 and older.
That said, AML can appear at any age. It occurs in children, teenagers, and younger adults, though far less frequently. The risk rises steadily with each decade of life, driven in part by the accumulation of genetic mutations in bone marrow cells over time and by increased exposure to risk factors like prior chemotherapy or radiation for other cancers.
AML in Children
Leukemia is the most common childhood cancer, but AML makes up a minority of those cases. About three out of four childhood leukemias are acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), with most of the remaining cases being AML. That makes pediatric AML uncommon in absolute terms, though it remains a serious diagnosis when it does occur because it tends to progress quickly and requires intensive treatment.
Differences by Sex
Men develop AML at higher rates than women. The gap is consistent across age groups, with men roughly 1.5 times more likely to be diagnosed than women in most datasets. The reasons aren’t entirely clear, but differences in occupational exposures, smoking rates, and possibly hormonal or genetic factors all play a role.
Racial and Ethnic Patterns
AML affects people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, but the patterns aren’t identical across groups. Research involving over 39,000 patients from national cancer registry data found that Hispanic patients had significantly higher mortality compared to non-Hispanic white patients, even though Hispanic patients tended to be diagnosed at younger ages, had similar rates of chemotherapy, and more often carried genetic markers associated with a favorable prognosis.
A smaller, more recent study at a single hospital system found a more nuanced picture. Among 162 AML patients treated between 2007 and 2022, Hispanic patients with high-risk disease actually lived longer than the combined non-Hispanic group (a median of 14 months versus 7 months). The conflicting findings highlight how much outcomes depend on local factors like access to care, hospital resources, and community demographics. What’s consistent across studies is that age and the genetic risk category of the leukemia itself are the strongest predictors of survival, regardless of race or ethnicity.
How AML Compares to Other Leukemias
There are four main types of leukemia, split by whether they’re acute or chronic and whether they involve myeloid or lymphoid cells. AML is the most common acute leukemia in adults but not the most common leukemia overall. Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) holds that distinction, with roughly 20,000 new cases per year in a generally older population as well. Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) is considerably rarer, with about 9,000 annual cases. ALL, the dominant childhood leukemia, accounts for around 6,000 new diagnoses per year across all ages.
Among all cancers combined, leukemias as a group represent about 3.5% of new diagnoses. AML specifically sits at around 1%, placing it in the uncommon category. For perspective, breast cancer produces roughly 300,000 new cases annually in the U.S., and lung cancer about 230,000.
Lifetime Risk
The average American’s lifetime risk of developing AML is less than 0.5%, or roughly 1 in 200. That figure rises for people with specific risk factors: prior treatment with certain chemotherapy drugs, prolonged exposure to benzene or other industrial chemicals, a history of blood disorders like myelodysplastic syndrome, or certain inherited genetic conditions like Down syndrome or Fanconi anemia. Smoking also increases AML risk, likely because tobacco smoke contains benzene and other chemicals that damage bone marrow cells.
Even with those risk factors, AML remains uncommon at the individual level. Most people with one or more risk factors will never develop the disease. But because AML progresses rapidly once it starts, awareness of early symptoms like persistent fatigue, unexplained bruising, frequent infections, and shortness of breath matters, especially for people over 60.