Two Different Ways of Collecting Life-saving Material
Bone Marrow: Marrow is found in the hollow cavities of the body's large bones. Donation involves withdrawing 2-3 percent of the donor's total marrow from the iliac crest of the hip, posterior aspect of the donor's pelvic bone. There is no cutting or stitching. The procedure involves a needle aspiration, performed using an anesthetic. Typically, the donor enters a medical center’s outpatient facility in the morning and goes home in the afternoon! Today, bone marrow is requested approximately 20 percent of the time.
Peripheral Blood Stem Cells (PBSC): It is possible to collect stem cells from the peripheral blood rather than the bone marrow. In order to collect a sufficient quantity of stem cells, injections of a medication called filgrastim must be administered. This mobilizes stem cells to travel from the bone marrow into the circulating blood. The stem cells are collected through a procedure called apheresis, which is similar to the process used in platelet donation. A cell separating machine filters out the stem cells, which can then be infused into the recipient. Today, PBSC is requested approximately 80 percent of the time.
There are clinical reasons why one cellular source may be more beneficial for the patient over the other. The transplant physician bases his or her request on this information. If a donor declines to donate via one method, the transplant center may or may not be able to accept the other, based on the clinical needs of the patient.
Read more about this topic: Gift Of Life Bone Marrow Foundation
Famous quotes containing the words ways, collecting and/or material:
“There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism—victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Thought dissolves the material universe by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)