Bone Marrow-Threatening Diseases
Some diseases can affect our bone marrow. For example, leukemia causes bone marrow to create abnormal white blood cells. And another issue, called aplastic anemia, results in bone marrow that doesn’t manufacture red blood cells at all.
Other diseases can cause bone marrow to overproduce white blood cells. These issues are called myeloproliferative disorders. Lymphoma can cause a person to need bone marrow when it actually invades the bone marrow itself, thus hurting the body’s ability to make blood cells.
This is why bone marrow donation is essential for saving lives. Just 1 to 5 percent of a donor's bone marrow is said to be needed to save a life.
How Does Donation Work?
When you decide to donate bone marrow to an unknown recipient, you are asked to join a registry. Doctors then will search for a match. This will be a donor that matches the recipient’s human leukocyte antigen (HLA) tissue type.
These are proteins located in the body’s cells that the immune system uses to differentiate between normal and abnormal cells. The doctor’s goal is to find a match between the patient and donor’s HLA markers, usually in someone of the same ethnicity. Once a match is found, bone marrow donation can take place.
However, the process of bone marrow donation isn’t as simple as other donations like whole-blood donation. Two types of bone marrow donations can be used. The first is called a peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) donation. This is the most common procedure performed and does not involve surgery.