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Old Wed Feb 8, 2017, 03:31 PM
Neil Cuadra Neil Cuadra is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Los Angeles, California
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Lia,

Does he have low blood counts, and that's why he was being evaluated?

If so, these are characteristics of aplastic anemia, and that may be what the doctor suspects he has.

"Cellularity" is how they measure the proportion of blood-producing cells in the bone marrow. A 13-year-old would normally have something like 90%. At birth it's 100% and normally goes down about 10% per decade, in rough numbers. "Hypocellular" means this number is lower than expected, which means that there is something wrong.

"No abnormal cells" means that the cells themselves are OK, i.e., there just aren't enough of them. That's a characteristic of aplastic anemia, as opposed to cancers like myelodysplastic syndromes where the cells are misshapen or otherwise damaged. So it's good news that the cells that are found in the bone marrow are normal.

Low blood counts (insufficient red cells, white cells, and platelets in the circulating blood) produce symptoms that lead people to the doctor. The doctor then looks for the cause, one possibility being aplastic anemia.
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