How can a patient prepare for a bone marrow transplant?
From the patient's side, they need to make sure that they have a full-time caregiver available. It can be family, it can be a friend in most cases. But patients need to have a caregiver available up to 100 days after the transplant.
Why up to 100 days?
Because this is the timeline when patients can have lots of potential complications such as infections, graft versus host disease, organ toxicities, following the transplant procedure. And when they are sick, they definitely need to have someone available who can take care of them during that period of time.
In addition to that, we also require for patients to live close by when they get discharged from the hospital. We've seen 30 up to 45-minute distance from the transplant center because if they acutely get sick, we want to make sure that they can get to us to the BMT unit rather quickly, so that we can take care of them, identify what’s the problem, and try to treat them in a timely manner.
Also, patients undergo assessment by a social worker and psychosocial assessment as well to make sure that they are all psychosocially ready for the transplant procedure. This is a big commitment both time-wise as well as from a complication risk standpoint. And that plays an important role in pretransplant assessment as well as for the patients.
HealthTree • March 28, 2025