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Faye,
The bone marrow is empty comment is an interesting one. i am wondering if they were referring to the cellularity of the marrow - ie how dense the marrow is. As a general rule, you would expect cellularity to be 100 minus your age in years. So in my case, the rule of thumb would say 100 -41 years of age for an expected cellularity of 59% give or take about 10% to hit the "normal" ranges. Marrow with low cellularity has trouble producing enough blood cells as they go through their cycle. Hypo-cellular MDS is less common but I think makes up to about 20% of cases out there. Most MDS is hypercellular, meaning that the marrow is more dense and crowded than would be expected. When I went in for transplant last year, I was around 90-95%.
The other possibility as Cheryl suggested is that it may also mean that you have a normal amount of blasts, which is always nice news to hear because it means that the factory is producing good cells and that the rest of your system does not have to search and destroy the defetive cells.
As for the taking people off of vidaza and restarting - this has been done in some trials, but I think that the consensus is that unless the patient begins to see marrow suppression or failure to respond to VIdaza that you should keep going with it until it stops working, and in these cases, it is more of a dose delay or reduction strategy.
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MDS RCMD w/grade 2-3 fibrosis. Allo-MUD Feb 26, 2014. Relapsed August 2014. Free and clear of MDS since November 2014 after treatment with Vidaza and Rituxan. Experiencing autoimmune attack on CNS thought to be GVHD, some gut, skin and ocular cGVHD. Neuropathy over 80% of body.
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