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Old Sat Aug 20, 2011, 01:28 AM
Neil Cuadra Neil Cuadra is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Los Angeles, California
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Paul,

This must all seem to be happening very fast since you were only diagnosed a couple of months ago but it sounds like your case has been handled by the book so far. Even serum sickness and tremors are, unfortunately, common side effects of the drugs you've been given. Giving the ATG time to show its effects makes sense. Note that the initials are A T G, which stands for anti-thymocyte globulin.

It shouldn't take long to check if your brother is a match or search the registries for an unrelated match, so you'll know if you have that option.

Bone marrow in aplastic anemia patients is hypoplastic, meaning there's a lack of cells. As a result, that introduces the possibility that it's really a form of MDS that is also hypoplastic. In MDS the cells are damaged, not just missing, but when you have very few cells the doctors can't get easily get a sample, so they don't know if your cells are damaged or not. It doesn't sound like there's evidence that you have MDS, just no way to rule it out for now. Doctors will probably want to do further bone marrow biopsies to keep an eye on your marrow.

Normal bone marrow has a small percentage of blasts (immature white blood cells), usually about 5%. Like other bone marrow cells, yours are apparently scarce.
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