What is bone marrow?
What is a bone marrow transplant?
Bone marrow is the spongy, soft central part of the bone.
Bone marrow contains blood stem cells which grow to become white blood cells that fight against infections or cancers, red blood cells that carry oxygen to tissues and platelets that prevent bleeding complications.
Bone marrow transplantation is the replacement of stem cells in bone marrow.
If it's performed from unrelated donor, then we used to replace unhealthy bone marrow stem cells with healthy bone marrow stem cells that we get from donors.
Bone marrow transplantation is not a surgical procedure, and it is done very similar to red blood cell transfusions.
It takes maximum couple of hours to infuse stem cells to patients.
And we use central line for infusion of these stem cells in patients.
Most of the time, patients tolerate, find the infusion without any side effects or complications related to that.
In some cases, however, patients may experience changes in their heart rate, blood pressure, or have shortness of breath.
In these situations, we stop the infusion, we give premedications and then slowly start using the stem cells again.
It is generally done within one day.
Then we slowly infuse it and that's why it's maximum can take a couple of hours
HealthTree • August 22, 2025