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Old Sat Mar 19, 2011, 04:40 PM
Neil Cuadra Neil Cuadra is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Los Angeles, California
Posts: 2,553
Edith,

Physicians can request a search of the marrow registry and have results the next business day. This identifies potential donors or cord blood units that match the patient by HLA type, based on information in the database.

Before the marrow can actually be used, there are more steps to the process. They have to verify the match with a new blood sample, test more thoroughly to see how good a match it is, and in the case of a volunteer donor (not cord blood) they have to see if the donor is really available, qualified by health, and willing to donate marrow or peripheral blood stem cells.

The median search times are 51 days for a volunteer donor and 2 weeks for a cord blood unit. That means that the process takes less than that amount of time for 50% of patients and more than that amount of time for the other 50%.

Here is a diagram of the search process.

When there are no matches the doctors can search other international registries or consider a transplant with a partial match. Some families organize their own community events to get people to join the registry, and it's great to get more people to sign up, but the chances of finding a match that way are very slim.

The more common the patient's HLA type, the more likely it is to find matches. Caucasians and patients with an American or European background have a statistical edge simply because a higher percentage of caucasians and westerners have joined the registry compared with other races, nationalities, and ethnicities.
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