Word: leukemias
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...destroys the bone marrow's blood-forming mechanism, and it incidentally suppresses the antibody reaction. Theoretically, it should be possible to cure many cases of radiation injury by injecting bone-marrow cells from donors while the patient's antibody production is knocked out. And in acute leukemia, when the bone marrow is secreting abnormal cells, it might be possible to destroy the marrow deliberately with massive radiation, then replace it with healthy marrow. It has worked in mice and dogs, but the human system, far more, choosy, usually gets its antibody factory working again, and thus defeats treatment...
From Twin or Fetus. This "autograft" principle was the basis of U.S. efforts to arrest leukemia. A four-year-old girl in Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital, in Cooperstown, N.Y., was near death, and anti-leukemia drugs would no longer give any relief. Dr. E. Donnall Thomas told an American Cancer Society seminar at Excelsior Springs, Mo. how he then placed the child between two cobalt "bombs" (equivalent to 2,000,000-volt X-ray machines) and subjected her to 800 r.-more than had ever before been given intentionally to a human being. Then he injected marrow cells taken from...
Because only one in about 200 people has an identical twin to serve as donor, Dr. Thomas has tried injecting another child leukemia victim with marrow cells taken from a fetus in a therapeutic abortion. (Fetal cells rarely trigger the antibody reaction.) It is too early, he said, to judge results in this case...
Relying on the fact that drugs can usually restore even children with severe leukemia to a normal-appearing blood pattern for a while, a Harvard University research team at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital tried yet another approach. They took bone marrow from the patients during such remissions, deep-froze it until all drugs had ceased to work, then gave the children 600 r. of X rays and a prompt reinjection of their own marrow. In the New England Journal of Medicine the doctors report that one case was a clear failure; the second child died, but with...
...doctors cannot estimate how long these remissions may last. Even with a patient's own marrow, they cannot be sure that it was as healthy as it looked. But the Boston team and Dr. Thomas agree that if the principle can be shown to work in leukemia, it may be possible to extend it to other forms of widespread cancer...