Umbilical cord blood transplantation treats high-risk ALL

Isabella · New User Joined: 06 Dec 2005 Posts: 5

Has anyone read this article? I found it on www.cordbloodrights.org. I thought it was really interesting.

How is everyone's opinion about this? Just wanted to know where people stand?

Umbilical cord blood transplantation effectively treats high-risk acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

"Optimal therapy for high risk and relapsed acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) remains uncertain. Wider availability of cord blood from related and unrelated donors has prompted studies of its use for hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT)," researchers in the United States report.

The authors "evaluated 26 consecutive cord blood transplants (CBT) for ALL performed at our center from 1996 to 2002 on studies using consistent conditioning therapy and graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) prophylaxis.

"Median patient age was 8.5 years (range, 0.5-24 year). Cord blood (CB) was from unrelated donors in 25/26 cases. Median CB nucleated cell dose was 3.26e7/kg (range, 0.8-12.9)."

"With median follow-up of 548 days, 16/26 patients (62%) are event-free survivors. Acute GVHD developed in 14/24 evaluable patients, reaching grade III-IV in 7 patients. Chronic GVHD occurred in 10/22 evaluable patients.

"Multivariate analysis showed higher total nucleated cell dose per kilogram to be the strongest predictor of event-free survival," wrote K.K. Sawczyn and colleagues at the Children's Hospital in Denver.

Sawczyn concluded that CBT "can effectively treat ALL in children with high risk features and following relapse."

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