National Post – November 19, 2009
Transplant list swells as family size shrinks
By Tom Blackwell
The shrinking size of Canadian families is taking an unexpected toll on health care, making it steadily more difficult for cancer patients to find siblings who can donate bone marrow for potentially life-saving transplants, a new study suggests. With couples in recent decades giving birth to fewer children, the chances of a leukemia patient having a brother or sister who matches their genetics will soon be less than half what it was just a few years ago, Ottawa-based researchers concluded.
The problem has contributed to a waiting list for bone-marrow transplants from non-family donors that has almost tripled in five years. Half those in the queue never get a transplant, which pump in stem cells for treating certain cancers and other diseases.
“Whatever the factors were that led to smaller families, it has impacted on our treatment options,” said Dr. David Allan, an Ottawa Hospital hematologist who headed the research. The declining pool of sibling bone-marrow transplants underlines the need to set up a national bank of umbilical-cord blood samples, an alternative, although more risky, source of stem cells, the study authors say.
Public date: November 20th, 2009
