Submitted May 17, 2006
Accepted August 2, 2006
Long-term outcome of patients transplanted with mobilized blood or bone marrow: a report from the International Bone Marrow Transplant Registry and the European Group for Blood and Marrow Transplantation
Norbert Schmitz, Mary Eapen*, Mary M. Horowitz, Mei-Jie Zhang, John P. Klein, J D Rizzo, Fausto R. Loberiza, Alois Gratwohl, and Richard E. Champlin
Department of Hematology, AK St. Georg, Hamburg, Germany
Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha, Nebraska, USA
Kantonsspital Basel, Basel, Switzerland;
M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas, USA
* Corresponding author; email: meapen{at}mcw.edu.
We previously compared outcomes after allogeneic peripheral blood stem cells (PBSC) and bone marrow (BM) transplantation in 706 patients with leukemia.1 We obtained long-term follow up on 413 of 491 patients who were alive at the time of the initial report: 141 PBSC and 272 BM recipients. Chronic GVHD was more frequent after PBSC compared to BM transplantation (RR 1.65, p<0.0001) yet relapse rates were similar in both groups. Leukemia-free survival rates were higher after PBSC than BM transplantation for patients with advanced chronic myeloid leukemia (33% vs.25%) but lower for those in first chronic phase (41% vs. 61%) due to higher rates of late transplant-related mortality. Leukemia-free survival was similar after PBSC and BM transplantation for acute leukemia. These data represent the early experience with PBSC grafts. Long-term outcomes in recipients of more recent transplants are required to better evaluate the role of PBSC grafts relative to BM.
