Bone marrow transplants are both incredibly risky as well as expensive procedures. Nonetheless, they are still effective and have been used by doctors since the 1950s, with many successful procedures completed over the years.
However, because of their inherent risk, bone marrow transplantation is typically only ever used as a last resort after every other possible treatment has been tried and failed.
The Treatment and How It Works
Bone marrow itself is the spongy tissue that lies at the center of bones and it contains special stem cells that are responsible for producing millions of blood cells every day. In order to do a bone marrow transplant, the patient’s current bone marrow needs to be destroyed in order to pave the way for the donor cells. This is accomplished through intensive chemotherapy or radiotherapy that wipes out the bone marrow while also suppressing the patient’s immune system so that it doesn’t attack the new bone marrow after transplantation.
A donor is also required for a bone marrow transplantation. Some patients may be able to use their own bone marrow by saving some in advance, but more often than not, they need to have a donor give their bone marrow stem cells to them. The donor doesn’t have to be related to the patient, but this is pretty common.
Once the patient’s bone marrow has been completely removed and their immune system has been suppressed, the actual transplantation can begin.
The actual transplantation itself is a pretty simple, and painless, process. The bone marrow stem cells are infused into the patient through their central line, through which they eventually find their way into the patient’s bones, where they begin creating new blood cells.
There are a number of potential side effects and complications that can arise from the bone marrow transplantation process, which makes it inherently risky. These can include anemia, fluid overload, respiratory disease, graft-versus-host disease, organ damage, and a myriad of different infections.
Despite the potential dangers and uncertainty involved with bone marrow transplantation, many patients find that is their only hope to live a healthier life and opt to try it.
What Bone Marrow Transplantation Can Cure
The number of different diseases that a bone marrow transplant is capable of treating is staggering. More than 70 diseases have been successfully treated by bone marrow transplantation so far. This includes Hodgkin’s lymphoma, severe aplastic anemia, sickle cell disease, testicular cancer, severe combined immunodeficiency, acute myeloid leukemia, and many more. People who suffer from any of these debilitating diseases could potentially find relief through a bone marrow transplant.
Along with treating a myriad of diseases, bone marrow transplants are also done for those who have had their bone marrow destroyed by intensive cancer treatments. Knowing that a patient can receive a bone marrow transplantation allows doctors the ability to give them higher doses of chemotherapy or radiation to treat their cancer, giving the patient a better outcome overall. This means bone marrow transplants indirectly aid with curing cancer as well.
The Future of Bone Marrow Transplants
While we already know that bone marrow transplants are capable of treating or helping with the treatment of, over 70 different diseases, researchers are always looking into other illnesses that it could be used as a treatment for.
Most recently, bone marrow transplantation has been used to treat human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) successfully twice now. In both of these cases, the patients were undergoing bone marrow transplantation for something completely unrelated to their HIV but then discovered that it ended up curing them of HIV as well.
While this is promising news for the future of HIV treatments, the researchers who studied one of the patients are leery of calling it a cure just yet and a lot more research needs to be done before it becomes a viable treatment for those suffering from HIV. But if future studies show that it does, in fact, cure HIV, then it could offer the millions of people infected with HIV a way to finally be cured of this crippling virus.
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