 Part VII |
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| Questions 1-4 refer to the following information. |
When doctors completed the first successful bone marrow transplant in 1968, their discovery charted a new course for the treatment of leukemia and many other life-threatening blood diseases.
This breakthrough gave critically ill people an option that never existed before. Although many of these potentially fatal blood diseases go into remission, they will eventually claim the lives of their victims. With the possibility of finding a marrow donor match in the National Registry, these patients’ odds of living a normal healthy life increase dramatically. Tissue types are inherited, therefore, a patient’s best chance of finding a matched donor is within his or her family, or if that search is unsuccessful, with someone else from the patient’s own ethnic group.
Only 33 percent of those who need marrow transplants will find matched donors within their families. The rest must search for unrelated donors. If a volunteer is ever matched with a patient in need and is unable to donate, the volunteer’s sibling may also be a matched donor for that patient because of the shared genetic background. Please share this information with your siblings; it could be vital for a searching patient.
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