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Author Topic: Mini-Transplants Reverse Adult Sickle Cell Disease  (Read 1668 times)
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MuffyBee
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« on: December 09, 2009, 10:54:57 PM »

http://www.webmd.com/brain/news/20091209/mini-transplants-reverse-adult-sickle-cell-disease

Mini-Transplants Reverse Adult Sickle Cell Disease
Study Shows Gentler Stem Cell Transplants Work in Adults

By Daniel J. DeNoon
WebMD Health News
Reviewed by Brunilda Nazario, MD

Dec. 9, 2009 - A gentler form of blood stem cell transplant can reverse severe sickle cell disease in adults lucky enough to find a matched donor.

Patients with sickle cell disease have a genetic mutation that results in defective crescent-shaped red blood cells. Severe disease causes stroke, severe pain, and often fatal damage to major organs.

Blood stem cell transplants have reversed sickle cell disease in some 200 children. But the procedure, which requires destruction of the patients' defective cells by radiation and chemotherapy to make room for the transplanted cells -- is too intense for adults weakened by sickle cell disease.

Moreover, adult patients are more prone to deadly graft-versus-host disease ( GVHD), in which the transplanted cells attack the recipient.

But recent studies show that in some stem cell transplant recipients, some host cells survive the toxic "conditioning regimen" of radiation and drugs -- and their progeny happily coexist with those of the transplanted stem cells.
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MuffyBee
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« Reply #1 on: December 09, 2009, 10:57:53 PM »

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-sci-sickle-cell10-2009dec10,0,3447046.story

Bone marrow transplant 'gets rid of' sickle cell anemia

In a study of 10 adults with the blood disease, the procedure cures nine. More tests are needed, but the treatment could be used on other diseases as well.

By Thomas H. Maugh II

December 9, 2009

Researchers have for the first time performed a successful bone marrow transplant to cure sickle cell disease in adults, a feat that could expand the procedure to more of the 70,000 Americans with the disease -- and possibly some other diseases as well.

About 200 children have been cured of sickle cell with transplants, but the procedure was considered too harsh for adults with severe sickle cell disease. Now a team from the National Institutes of Health and Johns Hopkins University is reporting tomorrow's New England Journal of Medicine that it has developed a much-less-toxic transplant procedure and used it to cure nine of the first 10 patients studied.
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  " Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."  - Daniel Moynihan
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