| name: | Bone Marrow Transplant |
| also known as: | Stem Cell Transplant; BMT |
| also see: | Aplastic Anemia; Acute Leukemia; Lymphoma; Hodgkin's Disease; Breast Cancer; Umbilical Cord Blood Banking; CPT |
| description: | The classic example of bone marrow transplant is removal of some bone marrow from a matched donor and transplant into a recipient, a procedure termed allogenic bone marrow transplant. Recipients might have aplastic anemia, acute leukemia, severe combined immunodeficiency syndrome, or some severe immunodeficiency disease. Autologous bone marrow transplant such as for metastatic breast cancer, relapsed lymphoma and acute leukemia, involves removing healthy stem cells from the patient's own bone marrow, then giving the patient high dose chemotherapy in an attempt to wipe out all cancer cells, and then rescue the patient by returning to them their own stem cells. Autogenous bone marrow transplant is from a donor transplant. |
| signs & symptoms: | Go to Also See above and click on the highlighted disease of interest. |
| diagnosis: | Go to Also See above and click on the highlighted disease of interest. |
| treatment: | Allogenic bone marrow transplant involves finding a matched donor, checking out the donor for diseases, preparing both the donor and the recipient for transplantation, giving the recipient immunosuppressive drugs so they won't reject the transplant, harvesting the bone marrow from the donor's pelvic bone and injecting it into the recipient's vein. Autologous bone marrow transplant involves harvesting healthy bone marrow stem cells from the patient's pelvic bone, giving the patient very high dose chemotherapy drugs to wipe out everything, and then rescuing the patient by returning to them their own stem cells. |
| prevention: | Complications include the donor site bleeding and wound infection. Complications in the recipient person from allogenic grafts includes graft rejection and overwhelming infection. Complications in Autologous grafts includes failure, overwhelming infection. |
| outcome: | Requires several days to several weeks in the hospital, if not longer. Outcome is determined by success and clinical trials are still ongoing. |
skynetMD suggests the following:
| if: | If the person has received a bone marrow transplant, and develops signs of infection, or develops reactions to medications or severe side affects, or develops signs of rejection |
| go to: | Go to the doctor |
Last updated 4/4/2010