What are the risks and complications of a bone marrow biopsy?

What are some possible risks or complications? At what point should patients consult their doctor about side effects they may experience? There are a few major risks every patient should be aware of when doing bone marrow biopsy. As I said before, this is a low risk procedure according to our procedure guidelines within the hospital. The major risks to know about a bone marrow biopsy first is bleeding. When we think of bleeding, it's generally not like oozing bleeding or dripping bleeding or soaking through a bandage. Usually when we talk about bleeding, what happens is there's hematoma formation, which is like a large bruise at the side of the biopsy. This just feels like an uncomfortable lump under the skin. As long as the size of the hematoma stops growing once it's formed, then it's not dangerous. It's not the type of blood clot that could hurt a patient or break off and go to the lungs or the legs or cause a stroke. The body just has to heal that clot over time. That can take a few weeks to get better and so patients need to know that if that rare complication were to occur, it could take several weeks for that soreness to go away. Again, very rare to have that. So that's bleeding complications. Infection complications, as I talked about before, so patients should look for redness, warmth, swelling, or drainage at the side of the bone marrow biopsy. If any of those arise, they should call their treatment team immediately. In every bone marrow biopsy, we give our patients a daytime and an after hours number to call. So if there were ever any sign of infection, a fever, or those symptoms I discussed, they should just call clinic and we can walk them through what to do. And then the last risk of the procedure is that we are using sharp implements. There is a small risk that the tools we use could damage something that we're not supposed to. What I tell patients though is if there's any question before the procedure starts that we can't get in the right spot, we'll just send them to do this in interventional radiology with a CT scanner. But this procedure is very safe to do in the clinic space without image guidance. It's a very safe procedure to do in that setting. So generally we don't have to do that.