Why More African Americans Should Donate Bone Marrow

BlackDoctor.org’s “Ask the Expert” series brings the nation’s leading health experts directly to viewers. In this video, Dr. Craig Cole, Hematologist and Assistant Professor at University of Michigan, discusses multiple myeloma. 

Transcript

So, for the blood cancers, for the Leukemia, Lymphoma, and myeloma, some of those diseases require bone marrow transplantation in order for people to survive the disease. Bone marrow donation or a bone marrow transplant is when people patients receive high doses of chemotherapy to eliminate the disease and they receive a donor bone marrow to help make blood for them after they finished the chemotherapy.

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The one specific thing or one very fine point about bone marrow bone marrow transplant is that people of different ethnicities have to get donors from specific ethnicities. People who are Japanese will only match other people from Japan. People from the Middle East will only match people from the Middle East.

And therefore when African-Americans who do get blood cancer, they get leukemia, and lymphoma, and myeloma, when they need a donor for a bone marrow transplant, which is life-saving, they have to get it from somebody of their own ethnicity. So, it’s critical that we have a wide variety a large number of potential donors.

And it’s really easy to become a bone-marrow donor. It’s just a mouth swab; it’s not even a blood test. You just do a mouth swab and they can check your type your bone marrow type from a mouth swab.

Then there’s a National bone marrow registry and they will match a patient to the DNA and the mouth swab and if they call you to be a donor, that’s easy too. You go to your local your local clinic that does the bone marrow harvest and we don’t do bone marrow biopsies for harvesting anymore. It’s just like giving plasma.

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So, they’re stem cells floating in our blood all the time and what you do when you donate for a bone marrow transplant, they put an IV in your arm and you just donate blood and the blood goes through a filter which captures the stem cells, which then goes to the patient. So, there’s no bone marrow biopsy, there’s only one needle involved in being a bone marrow donor and that’s just in the arm.

Is there a cost?

There is no cost. So, all the cost accrued for being a bone marrow donor goes to the patient’s insurance company.