Cancer – Stem Cell Transplant

Transcript

When you hear something called a stem cell transplant, I think loosely often people think of an Allo transplant. And an Allo graft means basically you’re getting stem cells from somebody that’s not, you it’s somebody else. But there are things called auto transplants and auto transplants are your own stem cells that you’re reintroducing into your body. Those are two, not completely different processes, but certainly a big difference in severity and what they entail. Auto transplants are used for things like multiple myeloma and some lymphomas. And yes, you do get pretty high, intense therapy where your counts get low and you put in your own stem cells, but you don’t have the risks graft versus host disease or host versus graft disease. And that is a process that’s very complicated and difficult to manage. That is what happens with an Allo transplant. Allo transplants are what you usually do for leukemia or other very aggressive diseases where you can’t even trust your own stem cells to behave correctly. And you need to take them from somebody else. They donate it to you. And that’s something that is very intense and has a lot of high-maintenance kind of observation and visits after that process. And the process itself takes easily 35 or 40 days, but it’s important to ask your oncologist what is involved in either, and if it’s going to be elected for what the risks are.