[Greg H]

Originally Posted by cfutia22

My son has no biological relatives and we will not put him through a bone marrow transplant with an unrelated donor (even if one could be found).

Hi Christine,

Marlene has given you excellent advice on the near impossibility of predicting what the marrow can and will do.

I respect your decisions about your son's health. But I detect in the sentence quoted above a perception that a transplant from a matched sibling donor may be superior to that from a matched unrelated donor. While this has certainly been the case historically, it is less and less so with each passing year. I recently heard an AA&MDS webinar on transplant for AA in which Dr. Joachim Deeg made this point.

This graph, though not specifically for transplants for DC (which is rare enough that there's probably not enough data to make such a chart), illustrates the point.

[IMG]
CIBMTR Survival Slides 2010-09-26 by hankins.greg, on Flickr[/IMG]

Again, I have complete respect for your decision as you have expressed it. I just wanted to share this information in case you hadn't run across it. My transplant doc is from India, and did by way of illustration, suggest to me at one point that it can be particularly hard to find unrelated matched donors for folks from that part of the world, because of the multiplicity of mixed ethnicities.

Good luck to you and your son.

Greg