Study: Bone Marrow From Donor Helps Heart Transplant Recipients

Children who receive heart transplants have significantly fewer episodes of late organ rejection if bone marrow from their donor is injected into their thymus glands during the surgery, according to University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine researchers.

These children also require fewer anti-rejection drugs, the researchers reported at the joint scientific meeting of the American Society of Transplantation and the American Society of Transplant Surgeons.

Chronic rejection, characterized by scarring and narrowing of the heart's vessels, usually develops within five years in about 10 to 15 percent of all pediatric heart transplant patients and is the leading cause of late death.

Since the nerves supplying the heart are cut during surgery and cannot be reconnected, patients don't typically have angina pain and the first warning of chronic rejection could be a heart attack or even sudden death.

In their study, 14 children received intrathymic bone marrow during heart transplantation. Immediately following heart implantation, surgeons injected the donor bone marrow contained in a small syringe into several sites of the patient's thymus.

The researchers followed the patients for an average of 30 months, and compared them to 23 patients for whom donor bone marrow was not available at the time of their heart transplants.

While the incidence of acute rejection episodes within the first six months after transplantation was comparable in the two groups, after six months, differences were more apparent, and at one year, the rates were significantly less in the thymus patients, the researchers reported.

Among the patients who received bone marrow, one episode of acute rejection occurred between six and 12 months and one episode occurred later than 12 months, compared to six episodes that occurred after six months and 22 that occurred beyond one year in the control patients.

Other Sources: University of Pittsburgh