What Is the Life Expectancy after a Bone Marrow Transplant? (2024)

FAQs

What Is the Life Expectancy after a Bone Marrow Transplant? ›

How long can you live after a bone marrow transplant? Understandably, transplants for patients with nonmalignant diseases have a much better success rate with 70% to 90 % survival with a matched sibling donor and 36% to 65% with unrelated donors.

Study Population

Overall, the estimated survival of the study cohort was 80.4% (95% CI, 78.1% to 82.6%) at 20 years after transplantation. Survival beyond 5 years correlated inversely with age at transplantation (Fig 1).

At 75, Chris Lundy is one of the longest living recipients of a bone marrow transplant. He was among the patients included in the 1975 paper published in the New England Journal of Medicinetitled “Bone-Marrow Transplantation.”

Infections, toxicity, and (after allogeneic HSCT only), graft-vs. -host disease (GVHD) are the main causes of death.

Life expectancy for people with bone marrow failure can range from months to a full lifespan. Life expectancy varies by a person's: Specific bone marrow condition. Severity of disease.

It usually takes 3 to 12 months for your immune system to recover from your transplant. The first year after transplant is like your first year of life as a newborn baby. During this time, you're at risk for infection. Your transplant team will check your blood cell counts to see how well your immune system is working.

The risk of leukemic relapse varies from 20% to 60% depending on the diagnosis and phase of disease. Reinduction chemotherapy (CT), second BMT, interferon (IFN) alfa, and donor leukocyte infusions are various options, but none of the approaches is clearly optimal.

In the days and weeks after your bone marrow transplant, you'll have blood tests and other tests to monitor your condition. You may need medicine to manage complications, such as nausea and diarrhea. After your bone marrow transplant, you'll remain under close medical care.

Damaged bone marrow makes too few blood cells and not enough cells for your immune system. A transplant can cure certain diseases or some types of cancer. It also means a long recovery process and a risk of serious side effects. Your doctor can talk with you about all the pros and cons of the transplant.

GvHD means the graft reacts against the host. The graft is the marrow or stem cells from the donor. The host is the person having the transplant. GvHD happens when particular types of white blood cell (T cells) in the donated stem cells or bone marrow attack your own body cells.

Why is bone marrow transplant bad? ›

Graft failure may happen as a result of infection, recurrent disease, or if the stem cell count of the donated marrow was insufficient to cause engraftment. Graft-versus-host disease. Graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) can be a serious and life-threatening complication of a bone marrow transplant.

Despite improvements in therapy, approximately 5% of patients who undergo autologous stem cell transplantation (ASCT) experience early mortality (EM), death within 1 year of transplant (EM post-ASCT). Such patients tend to have few comorbidities suggesting their EM is owing to aggressive underlying disease.

Late relapse (>2 years) after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (AHSCT) for acute leukemia occurs at a frequency of 4.2%. One-third of patients have extramedullary disease with persistent full donor chimerism. Overall survival (OS) at 2 years after late relapse was 44%.

Conditional on surviving the first 2 to 5 years after allogeneic blood or marrow transplantation (BMT), the 10-year overall survival approaches 80%. Nonetheless, the risk of late mortality remains higher than the age- and sex-matched general population for several years after BMT.

There is no age limit for a bone marrow transplant, the biggest factor that determines whether or not someone would be eligible for this treatment is their health.

Survival in inherited bone marrow failure syndromes depends largely on the age at the time of transplant, disease severity, and response to initial therapy. Ten-year survival rates for HSCT are 83%, 73%, 68%, and 51% in the first, second, third, and fifth decades, respectively.

Survivors of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) in childhood often have long-term organ damage after transplantation from their exposure to high-dose chemotherapy and radiation. This section reviews many of the organ systems that may be affected by the conditioning for HSCT.

Recovery. Once the transplant is finished, you'll need to stay in hospital for a few weeks while you wait for the stem cells to settle in your bone marrow and start producing new blood cells. During this period you may: feel weak, and you may experience diarrhoea and vomiting, and/or a loss of appetite.

Over 60% of adults and over 70% of children with poor risk ALL in first remission, and 30-40% of patients in second remissions can be expected to achieve long term leukaemia-free survival.