Stem Cell Transplantation
Stem cell transplantation is a necessity for many cancer patients who undergo a very intense chemotherapy treatment. All the medication used to destroy the cancer cells affect all the body cells that have a high division rate, which includes bone marrow, hair follicles and digestive linings. The problem comes from the fact that an anti-cancer treatment triggers the blood’s incapacity to regenerate. When the bone marrow blood generating cells are destroyed, the only chance of blood production is through stem cell transplantation. To make it even clearer than that, stem cells will be able to evolve into specialized blood cells such as platelets, white and red cells.
hematopoietic stem cell transplantation
Bone marrow transplant represents the most basic form of stem cell transplantation, and the practice of this treatment has brought numerous successes. A donor is most of the time necessary to provide the right amount of biological material to support the chemotherapy treatment of a cancer patient. If this is not possible, doctors will perform a stem cell collection from the patient’s own bone marrow, before the beginning of chemotherapy. The stem cells will be frozen and stored until the intervention.
blood stem cell transplantation
The use of the umbilical cord blood and of peripheral blood represent the alternatives to stem cell transplantation from bone marrow. Nevertheless, such procedures have just started being put into practice since they usually need special equipment and modern technologies. Hence, the bone marrow transplant remains the most popular and widely used kind of stem cell transplantation in the world. It has a high rate of success, although it often requires several transplants before complete blood regeneration. Normally, for each intensive chemotherapy session, there will be a stem cell transplantation as well.
It is important that the doctor, the patient and his/her family as well as the donor be informed about the risks, the success rate, the advantages and the inconveniences of a stem cell transplantation. Risks, health threats, discomforts, pain, all have to be known or explained in advance. The methods used are no mystery, and the patient and donor should be familiar with everything that a stem cell transplantation involves.
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