November 8, 2001
November is National Marrow Awareness Month
Share the gift of life with one of the many cancer patients in need of a bone marrow transplant. November is National Marrow Awareness month and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is encouraging people to volunteer as bone marrow and stem cell donors.
More than 30,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with leukemias, anemias, myelodysplastic disorders and 70 other life-threatening diseases which can only be cured by a marrow, blood stem cell or umbilical cord blood transplant. Nearly 75 percent of these patients must rely on an unrelated donor for their transplants.
"Every day more than 3,000 patients contact the National Marrow Donor Program and other worldwide registries in search of match," says Elizabeth Charney, Dana-Farber's Donor Center coordinator. "There clearly is a constant need for donors."
As a National Marrow Donor Program Transplant Center, Dana-Farber's Bone Marrow Transplantation Program offers patients peripheral blood stem cell transplants and marrow grafting from family members or unrelated donors, as well as transplants using the patient's own stem cells.
Established in the early 1970s, the Bone Marrow Transplant Program at Dana-Farber was one of the first such programs in the world, and is now one of the largest and busiest in the United States. The program performs more than 250 transplants annually and has performed more than 4,000 transplants since its inception
While there is a need for donors of all races, there is an urgent need for minority donors. To find a compatible donor, certain tissue traits of the donor and the patient must match. These traits are inherited, thus the most likely donor will come from the patient's same racial or ethnic group.
Minorities only comprise 25 percent of the national registry and are less likely than Caucasians to find a matched donor on it. Moreover, many minority tissue types - especially those found in African Americans - are rarely found in other populations. More donors of diverse race and ethnicity mean that all people will have an equal chance of finding a matched donor.
Joining the national registry is a simple process needing only a small blood test, but becoming a volunteer donor is a serious commitment. Those who join the registry are asked to remain committed to donating for any patient, anywhere in the world, regardless of the patient's sex, age, race or ethnicity. This commitment can mean the difference between life and death for the patient.
"Donating bone marrow or stem cells is a truly altruistic endeavor in which one feels an extraordinary sense of accomplishment. Helping to give someone's parent, sibling or child a chance of a lifetime is one of life's rarest gifts," explains Charney.
To find out more about Dana-Farber's Bone Marrow Transplant Program, please call (617) 632-6140 or visit online at www.dana-farber.org/how/donatebone/.
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is a principal teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, a federally designated Center for AIDS Research, and a founding member of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, a federally designated comprehensive cancer center.
