Word: marrow
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...grass and some day to live normally in the world. For this hope David, 12, and his family took the ultimate gamble: they traded the safety of a germ-free plastic bubble at Houston's Texas Children's Hospital for the slim chance that a bone-marrow transplant would allow the immunologically defenseless boy to live freely. Last week they lost their gamble, and his death was felt across the country...
...only hope for a cure was a transplant of bone marrow, which could provide the body with a rapidly multiplying source of defender cells to ward off disease. Such transplants were once possible only if a genetically matched donor, generally a sibling, could be found. Sadly, David's older sister's cell type did not match his. In the past few years, however, new technology has made it possible to transplant imperfectly matched marrow, making obsolete the isolation approach to David's illness. "There will be no more bubbles," said Dr. William Shearer...
...waiting arms. But that brief reunion was clouded by worry: a persistent fever, diarrhea and vomiting had made it necessary for doctors to treat him outside the bubble. The symptoms, doctors feared, were signs of the often fatal graft vs. host disease, which occurs when cells from donated marrow attack the recipient's body. During the next 15 days, David developed severe ulceration of his digestive tract and a dangerous accumulation of fluid in his lungs and around his heart. The exhausted child finally died of cardiac failure. Shearer recalled that at the end David asked...
...David, a marrow transplant was initially out of the question: no one in his family matched his cell type. But in the past few years, researchers at Harvard and New York City's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center have developed ways of chemically treating bone marrow so that transplants can be made even when the grafted marrow is imperfectly matched. These new methods made it possible for David to receive a marrow graft from his 15-year-old sister, Katherine...
...major peril in transplanting mismatched bone marrow has always been a rejection problem called graft-vs.-host disease. Even with treated marrow, there is some risk. According to Dr. Richard O'Reilly of Sloan Kettering, the disease is "the exact opposite of what we talk about with kidney or heart patients. Instead of the patient rejecting the organ, the cells that go in as the transplant literally reject the patient." If unchecked, the disease eventually destroys the liver, intestine and other vital organs. Early symptoms are similar to David's: nausea, diarrhea, fever...