Recent treatments of aplastic anemia. The International Group on SAA

The treatment of severe aplastic anemia has been modified recently by the demonstration that Cyclosporine A is active alone or in combination leading to more than 50% response rate. Combination or sequential treatments with ATG seem to be better than such drug separately but this must be studied in randomized studies. Long term follow-up is necessary to assess the rate of malignant transformation. Growth factors have been recently introduced. G or GM-CSF seem to be active. IL-3 has not been proven to be effective in very small non randomized study. Allogeneic bone marrow transplantation is the best treatment with a matched related donor, progress must be achieved in methods of conditioning and GVH prophylaxis when a matched unrelated donor is used.