Bone Marrow Transplant
A bone marrow transplant is a procedure which is carried out to replace damaged or destroyed bone marrow with healthy bone marrow stem cells. Bone marrow is the soft, fatty tissue inside your bones. Stem cells are immature cells in the bone marrow that give rise to all of your blood cells.
Need for Bone Marrow Transplant
Bone marrow produces stem cells and these cells ultimately develop into blood cells. Bone marrow is an extremely crucial part of the body as it's the body's main blood cell factory. An individual can become extremely ill and can even die if something is wrong with the marrow. Generally, the bone marrow becomes unhealthy when the person is affected by diseases such as leukemia and aplastic anemia. Bone marrow transplant is carried out with a purpose to replace unhealthy stem cells with the healthy ones. This can treat or even cure an ailment.
Two Types of Bone Marrow Transplants
• Autologous bone marrow transplant - The donor is the individual him/herself
• Allogenic bone marrow transplant - The donor is another individual whose tissue has the same genetic type as the individual needing the transplant (recipient). As the tissue types are inherited, similar to hair or eye color, it's more likely that the recipient will find a suitable donor in a brother or sister. However, this happens only to 25 to 30% of the time.
Reason to Perform the Transplant
A bone marrow transplant replaces a bone marrow that either is not working correctly or has been destroyed by radiation or chemotherapy. Your doctor might recommend a bone marrow transplant if you have:
• Certain cancers, such as lymphoma, leukemia and multiple myeloma
• An ailment that affects the production of bone marrow cells, such as congenital neutropenia, aplastic anemia, sickle cell anemia, severe immunodeficiency syndromes, thalassemia
• Undergone chemotherapy that destroyed your bone marrow
Risks Factors
A bone marrow transplant might cause the following symptoms:
• chest pain
• chills
• Drop in blood pressure
• fever, flushing
• headache, nausea
• pain, shortness of breath
Transplant
A bone marrow transplant is generally done in a hospital or medical center that specializes in such treatment. Most of the time, you will be kept in a special bone marrow transplant unit in the center. This is to restrict your chance of getting an infection. Depending on the treatment and where it's performed, all or part of an autologous or allogenic transplant might be done as an outpatient. It means you won't need to stay in the hospital.