Time limit for BMT failure

Dear members
I read in one of the posts that a BMT was done to a child and the doner was his brother who fully matched him and after 9 month failure occured . So my question is : how long it takes to be sure that the transplant has succeded as i thougt it is only 60 days.?!!!

Manal

Hello Manal,
                It's not the time limit. The blood counts tell the true story whether the Transplant is success or not. Some cases have shown pretty fast increase in blood counts while others are slow but they eventually make it to the normal levels slowly.

                In case of a failure you will see no improvement and in some cases it gets worse by graft vs host disease and other side effects.

my son had a BMT and failed after 9mos.  According to the transplant specialist i was told that it takes a year to be successful.  If the patient is transfussion free for a year theyre considered cured, atleast thats what i was told.   My son did not have rejection or graft vs host disease or anything like that.  simply the chemo that he was given  did not kill off all of his cells as they wouldve done with someone with cancer.  He had some cells left and they just took over his brothers cells.  For nine mos. he did fine and then all of a sudden his hemoglobin dropped to about a 6 at which time he needed a transfussion then he was given epotein for a while to see if that would help but it didnt and he returned to his monthly transfussion.  However that was over 14 yrs ago and i do know that now BMT's on thalassemia patients are more common and have a better success rate.

Lily,
That is exactly right. BMT's fail because the original bone marrow survives and reasserts itself. Khalifa's son had two BMT's and the first one failed for that very reason. With the second, they raised the dosage of chemotherapy before doing the transplant to ensure that all the original bone marrow was destroyed.

Thanks a lot for all the answers. But they aroused a new question which is : What is the side effect of chemo on the patients? Does it affect the fertility or the ablity to have children?

Thanks
Manal

hi manal,

according to what i was told 14 yrs ago, theres a big possibility that my son is sterile because of the chemo.  also we were told that there is also a possibility of developing some form of cancer from having chemo, i cant remember excatly the percentage on that, i know that it was small however it was significant enough that we had to sign papers regarding the effect.  my son has not been tested yet to see if he's sterile.
hope this helps,
take care

Thanks a lot Lily. Hope he is not.

My regards to both of you

Manal