Word: marrow
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hospital. But she checks in at the day-surgery department and is summoned to an examining room, from which she emerges a few minutes later in a baggy blue hospital gown and the inevitable plastic bracelet. Suddenly, she looks vulnerable. This morning Majewski is scheduled to undergo a bone-marrow harvest, in which doctors will remove about a quart of her marrow to be transplanted into a young patient dying of leukemia. She has never met the patient, who lives in Europe. They do not even know each other's names. They have been brought together by a computer search...
...Bone-marrow transplantation is often the last hope for people with devastating diseases: leukemia and other cancers, and certain genetic disorders of the blood, immune system or metabolism. Cure rates range from 20% to 80%, depending on the disease, its stage and the degree of compatibility between the donor's marrow and the recipient...
...recipient, the process begins with massive doses of chemotherapy or radiation, or both, to wipe out the disease. But that treatment kills the patient's bone-marrow cells as well. Without this spongy tissue at the core of many larger bones, a person cannot live. Marrow contains the precious stem cells that produce all the body's 30,000 trillion red blood cells, many of its infection-fighting white cells and the platelets that are essential for clotting...
...patient can begin the drastic treatment that will destroy bone marrow unless it is certain that the marrow can be replaced. Some have autologous transplants, in which their own marrow is harvested and returned to them later; others must search for allogeneic transplants from donors--usually relatives. But even close relatives do not always have compatible marrow. In recent years about two-thirds of all patients needing allogeneic transplants have sought unrelated donors...
...American Bone Marrow Donor Registry, based in Worcester, Mass., and the National Marrow Donor Program in Minneapolis, Minn., keep computer files on about 4.4 million people worldwide who have volunteered as donors. The odds of finding a matching donor average about 1 in 20,000--better for whites, tougher for others. An estimated 30,000 bone-marrow transplants are performed each year worldwide. But it is estimated that 60,000 others needing transplants die without ever finding a donor...