Where is myelofibrosis located in my body?

Where is myelofibrosis located in my body?

So it turns out myelofibrosis starts in a stem cell. That is a stem cell that makes all the blood cells in your body and that stem cell is located in the bone marrow. So the bone marrow is predominantly in the bone itself. If you've ever seen a soup bone, it's the pink stuff in the middle of the soup bone. And in adults, that's primarily in the long bones of your body. So your thighs, it's also in the hips, along the spine. It can be in the ribs.

And so you can imagine then, if you have myelofibrosis and that bone marrow is getting full of scar tissue, you might have bone pain. Myelofibrosis cells can also be found outside the bone marrow as the myelofibrosis progresses, because those stem cells are looking for a new home to grow. And so that's predominantly the spleen, but can also be found in the liver and then rarely can be found actually in the lungs or on the kidneys.

The way I like to think about this and describe it to patients is the bone marrow. The space inside your bones is the body's blood factory. And that particular factory makes red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. So the three major components of blood, this bone marrow is making cells over long periods of time. So the lifetime of the patient and occasionally one of the stem cells or the precursor cells that makes every other cell in the bone marrow will develop a mutation.

And that mutation leads to overproduction of cells and this bone marrow over proliferation process. If that blood factory develops scarring, it's generally not able to make enough blood for patients to sustain the various types of blood cells that the bone marrow produces. And so the body is smart and starts making blood in other places. So what we call secondary hematopoiesis.