Donating bone marrow...

sd123

I've been feeling somewhat chivalrous lately and was considering donating bone marrow. Does anyone know where and when I can do this, or if there's any requirements you must fulfill before doing it? And yes, I've heard it's extremely painful...:o

DrIndy

its not that straightforward!!!!!

what you will be doing is joining the Unrelated Bone Marrow Transport Registry. This is a worldwide system. You do so by opting onto the scheme when you are next donating regular blood, your white cells are analysed and HLA matched.

Ideal marrow donation is sibling-sibling because despite identical matches, there are other antigens out there in unrelated matches not yet identified and the incidence of graft-versus host disease are higher (this is like organ rejection in a kidney transplant, except the new marrow and new immune cells reject the entire new body instead).

So what happens is if there is no available sibling donor, then they search the Unrelated pool for a match - which may be for a patient in germany or australia or wherever.

Donations is not needed immediately, the patient has to be conditioned for a match with chemo which takes a while, so if they contact you, it will be for a few months time from then. If you go on the registry, you may be contacted next week, in 10 years or never.

Also the new fad is to do a peripheral stem cell harvest, which is much more pleasant than a bone marrow, involving a dialysis-canula inserted (usually into the great veins in the neck) and hooking you up to a blood-filtering system like a dialysis machine. You are fully concious throughout and the dialysis canula is inserted with only local anaesthetic. Drugs are given to condition the marrow so it releases its precursor cells directly into the blood and these can be hoovered out. If this doesn't work, then the old fashioned marrow harvest has to take place. Details are available online, but in a nutshell, they anaethestise you, drill one or 2 holes into your pelvis and then use a medical hoover to suck all the marrow out of your pelvis (about 1L - but it does recover fully).

This in all likelyhood will not even be used in ireland, but flown to somewhere else in the world.

hope this helps

Kwekubo

As it happens, only this weekend I was thinking about doing the same thing, as well as giving blood (never got around to it before). There's an all-day blood transfusion centre on D'Olier St.

norrie rugger

Want to do it myself.
we have a blood drive in work next month so was going to give them the details for Marrow harvest also