Combination Chemotherapy in Treating Young Patients With Newly Diagnosed Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia

Inclusion Criteria: * Patients must be newly diagnosed with a clinical diagnosis of acute promyelocytic leukemia initially by morphology (bone marrow or peripheral blood); bone marrow is highly preferred but in cases where marrow cannot be obtained at diagnosis, peripheral blood will be accepted; APL is considered a hematological emergency and treatment should be initiated as quickly as possible without waiting for molecular or cytogenetic/fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) confirmation; for patients who are unable to begin receiving ATRA in a timely manner following a presumed diagnosis of APL, consideration should be given to initiating ATRA and proceeding with treatment outside of the AAML0631 protocol; if the RQ-PCR results are known at the time of study enrollment, the patient must demonstrate PML-RARA and/or RARA-PML transcripts by RQ-PCR to be eligible; patients without evidence of APL by bone marrow or peripheral blood morphology but with isolated myeloid sarcoma (myeloblastoma; chloroma, including leukemia cutis) are eligible provided that the t(15;17) translocation is documented on either marrow or tumor tissue by cytogenetics, FISH, or PCR prior to study enrollment; in this situation, touch preps from the tumor site can be evaluated by FISH with PML-RARA probes; NOTE: A lumbar puncture is not required to be enrolled on study; if the diagnosis of APL is known or suspected, extreme caution must be exercised in performing a lumbar puncture during active coagul…