Alison,
Stem cell transplants are indeed dangerous, but so is High Risk MDS. The question is which treatment is best for your sister. That's no doubt what your family has been discussing with her doctors.
It's hard to get meaningful statistics on short-term and long-term transplant survival that would apply to one patient, for three reasons:
- MDS is a rare disease so the body of data is much smaller than for more common diseases.
- There are so many individual factors involved that statistics about other groups of patients may not offer a basis for useful predictions about an individual.
- Statistics reflect past treatments, and stem cell transplant procedures are constantly being improved.
You can review the records of recent transplant outcomes for individual treatment centers. See
How to Understand NMDP Transplant Center Statistics on the website of the National Marrow Donor Program. The "transplant center listings" link on that page will take you to a directory of treatment centers. Keep in mind that statistics tell only a small part of the story, and may not be useful if based on only a few patients.
If your sister's doctors are confident that the transplant in January is the best choice, that should give you confidence too. Who will the stem cell donor be?