About Bone Marrow, Transplant Procedure, Transplantation Risks, Transplants Treatment Types

Bone marrow is a spongy like substance inside some of your bones.  If you break a chicken’s leg in half you will get a glimpse at some cooked marrow.

If your body runs into a problem with your own bone marrow, it can be transplanted with healthy marrow.  Bone marrow contains stem cells, and their life preserving job is to develop into:

A couple scenarios in which bone marrow cells fails to perform normally, and may ultimately require a bone marrow transplantation, are:

Most who undergo a bone marrow transplant procedure have cancer.

A transplant procedure replaces your unhealthy blood forming cells with healthy ones.  Healthy blood forming cells are given to you through your vein, like a blood transfusion. When the transplanted cells begin to grow and make the red, white and platelet cells your body needs, you have achieved engraftment.

To prepare for this procedure, you may be given a strong chemotherapy and/or radiation conditioning treatment to kill your unhealthy cells first.

These are the different types of bone marrow transplants:

  • allogeneic transplant ~receive donor bone marrow or peripheral stem cells
  • autologous transplant ~ receive your own bone marrow or peripheral stem cells
  • syngeneic transplant ~ receive your identical twin’s bone marrow or peripheral stem cells

For about 6 weeks after one of these types of transplant treatment procedures, you will be more susceptible to infections.  Bacterial infections are the most common risk during this period.  Because of your increased risk for infection, you will be initially monitored closely and given antibiotics should you develop a fever.

It may take as long as a year after transplantation for your immune system to get back up to speed.

During the first month following your transplant, you are also at risk for excessive bleeding.  This is because the transplantation conditioning treatment destroys most of your platelets.  You might experience:

If you end up in a thrombocytopenia condition, you may be given a platelet transfusion.

Interstitial pneumonia is another early risk associated with bone marrow transplants.  This type of pneumonia is not caused by bacteria nor fungus, but instead by a virus or your transplant conditioning treatments.  You will need to be on the look out for shortness of breath type signs of pneumonia.

Up to a half of allogeneic type transplant recipients develop acute graft-versus-host disease.  This condition transpires when your donor’s immune cells respond to your body as foreign.  This is one reason why finding a “good” match is so imperative.

Graft-versus-host disease is classified as acute or chronic. And usually doesn’t happen with syngeneic or autologous transplants.

Acute form may manifest itself 10 days after a bone marrow transplant procedure, the first signs of a problem are palms of your hands and soles of your feet rash, burning and redness. Other symptoms include:

Most cases of acute graft-versus-host disease are mild and routinely have no long term effects. However, sometimes it can be serious or even life threatening.  Drugs are available to lessen an immune response.

Chronic graft-versus-host disease symptoms can last for over a year.  In addition to those symptoms potentially experienced with the acute version, you can encounter:

Chronic GVHD is treated with medications that suppress your immune system, similar to those for the acute type.

Very rarely after bone marrow transplantation, a graft failure results.  This issue arises when your body will not accept the transplanted stem cells.

After your bone marrow blood transplant, you need to focus on lending healthy choices support to your body during its hard work to rebuild your immune system and strength. This means:

The prospect of a bone marrow transplant may be unnerving, so do whatever it takes to maintain a health soothing positive attitude.

Ancillary Health Blurbs:

Books Regarding Bone Marrow Transplant:

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