Is red bone marrow from deceased persons used for donation?

Answer

Dear Dorothea,

The bone marrow needed for transplantation does not come from cadavers but from living donors. Moreover, most bone marrow transplants nowadays are no longer done with whole bone marrow but by means of so-called stem cells (this is then called a peripheral stem cell transplant).

To do this, the donor is first stimulated with hematopoietic growth factors, which causes a large number of stem cells to circulate in the peripheral blood. After sufficient stimulation, an apheresis can then take place to collect these stem cells and administer them to the patient. This has the advantage that this procedure is much less invasive for the donor. The donor may experience some bone pain due to the administration of the growth factors, but that is a smaller burden in connection with an operation with bone marrow punctures from the hip crests.

The bone marrow from cadavers (preferably recently deceased as the cells die quickly) is therefore now only used for research purposes and certainly not for bone marrow transplants.

Regards,

Glenn Van den Bosch