What happens during the bone marrow transplant procedure itself?
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Learn what happens during the bone marrow transplant procedure in this video.
Transcript
What happens during the bone marrow transplant procedure itself?
Learn what happens during the bone marrow transplant procedure in this video.Talking about the transplant, I actually back things up a week and a half to two weeks to talk about the chemotherapy and radiation that some patients receive and other medicines that they received to get their body ready to receive the transplant.
We call this a conditioning regimen or set of reduction. The purpose of these chemotherapies, radiation, and other medicines is twofold. One is to provide ongoing control of their AML to make sure that it stays down to a very low level, that when the immune system from the donor wakes up, it's small enough that it's able to attack it and clear it.
But it also has to completely obliterate or destroy the patient's immune system so they cannot reject this new bone marrow and immune system that are coming in. They will receive this for several days, sometimes even over a week, leading into their transplant.
When the transplant itself happens, we bring in the products which often will look like a red blood cell product. Bone marrow looks very similar to blood. Peripheral blood stem cells probably will not look as red. Cord blood units are very small as well.
These go in like a blood transfusion, typically through a central line or an IV for a patient. While we do these, we often will be checking their vitals to make sure we're not seeing any evidence of any type of reactions in the body, similar to what we do with blood transfusions.
I tell my patients on their transplant day that even though it's a very momentous and exciting day, we want it to also be a very unexciting and very anti-climactic procedure itself.
So when everything goes well with a bone marrow or stem cell transplant, the patient is just like they're getting a blood transfusion where the cells are coming in and they're just sitting there and then receiving the cells without a lot of other medical excitement going on.