Hi Vera,
Your results are fantastic, although I can't comprehend how it was that your counts weren't hammered during high-dose chemo. I concur with Birgitta-A; sure would like to know what your doctors might say about that. Low-dose chemo really lowered my counts following the five day cycles. Doubt many can say they went from RAEB-II to RA following any treatment. Looks like you may beat this MDS yet. Wishing you the best!
Hi Amy,
There used to be an age cutoff for consideration of a bone marrow transplant - no longer. Now the go no-go decision rests on the health of the transplant candidate. How many and how serious are the comorbidities comes into play, that is what is the prevailing health of the individual overall. Does he or she have diabetes, heart disease, COPD or such? It's these kind of things the doctor has to weigh.
Similarly there used to be a numerical value that was used for deciding when to transfuse a patient with red blood cells as I mentioned in a post above (not that each and every doctor subscribed to that value). Anyway I just read an interesting article, where Dr Shiffer, professor of medicine and oncology at Wayne State University in Detroit, presented a different approach to dealing with transfusion "trigger" decisions. He recommended that the doctor and patient work together to determine the HGB at which to transfuse based on avoiding waiting until the patient experiences symptoms.
That makes a lot of sense to me. If my HGB falls again, I'll certainly strive to get transfused prior to experiencing symptoms. The point is why go from feeling good to bad when with a little planning you can maintain the status where you feel good. The link to this article is below, but you'll probably have to register at OncologyStat to view it:
http://www.oncologystat.com/news-and...plasia_US.html