Bone Marrow Transplant
What is Bone Marrow Transplant ?
Bone marrow transplant is a way of giving very high dose chemotherapy, sometimes with whole body radiotherapy. This treatment aims to try to cure some types of cancer, such as leukaemia, lymphoma and myeloma. Because you can have higher doses of chemotherapy with this treatment, there may be a better chance of curing the cancer than with standard treatment.
The bone marrow is the spongy substance inside your bones which makes all your blood cells. High doses of chemotherapy drugs kill off your bone marrow. This means you can’t make any blood cells. So doctors can take bone marrow from a donor or from you before you have the chemotherapy. This is called a bone marrow harvest. They may freeze the bone marrow until you need it.
After you have had the high dose chemotherapy and perhaps whole body radiotherapy, you have the donor’s or your own bone marrow back into your bloodstream through a drip. The bone marrow cells find their way back to your bone marrow. Then you can make the blood cells you need again. This is called a bone marrow rescue. This is because bone marrow is given back to you to rescue you from the effects of your high dose treatment.
A transplant using donated bone marrow is called an allograft. A transplant using your own marrow is called an autologous transplant.
These days, doctors generally use stem cell transplants ( peripheral blood stem cell transplants) more commonly than bone marrow transplants. This is because it is usually easier to collect stem cells from the blood rather than the bone marrow, and doctors can normally get a larger volume of stem cells. After a transplant, your blood counts tend to recover faster after a stem cell transplant than a bone marrow transplant. But there may be a greater risk of a reaction called graft versus host disease (GVHD). This means the immune cells from donated bone marrow attack some of your body cells. There are many different factors that your doctor has to consider when deciding on the type of transplant you need. Your doctor will talk to you about this.