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Bone marrow transplants made safer
Associated Press
Published September 29, 2005
Doctors say they may have found a way to make bone marrow transplants safer and more effective against blood cancers like leukemia, an achievement that offers new hope for people over 50 in particular.
The advance by Stanford University doctors could make such transplants, which have dramatically improved cancer survival among children and young adults, more widely available to older people who typically don't fare as well.
Ideally, a leukemia or lymphoma patient would be given radiation or high doses of chemotherapy to destroy the cancerous bone marrow before receiving healthy marrow or blood stem cells from a donor. However, many patients, especially those older than 50, die of infections they are unable to fight off before the new marrow grows.
To avoid this problem, doctors usually destroy only part of the patient's original marrow. That brings other problems: Some cancerous blood cells remain, and the new marrow frequently attacks the old - an often-fatal problem called graft-versus-host disease.
Stanford researchers developed a way to condition the recipient to accept the new marrow and to inactivate the parts of the patient's immune system that would attack it.
[Last modified September 29, 2005, 01:20:09]
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