[Economic costs of autotransplantation of hematopoietic progenitors]

A comparative analysis of the economic costs of the different methods of autologous transplantation was carried out.

A series of 22 patients was retrospectively studied: 8 treated with autologous bone marrow transplantation (ABMT), 9 treated with peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) transplantation and 5 in whom mixed transplantation of bone marrow and peripheral blood hematopoietic progenitors was performed. The expenses derived from pretransplant studies and from the collection of hematopoietic progenitors and from the autologous transplantation procedure itself were evaluated.

The pretrasplant study and the collection of hemopoietic progenitors were significantly more expensive in the PBSC than in the ABMT (p = 0.04 and p = 0.007, respectively). Nonetheless, the costs of the transplant procedure were lower in the PBSC than in the ABMT group although the differences were not statistically significant. The estimated costs of these procedures in the Hematology Unit of the General Hospital of the University of Murcia, Spain, is of 3 million pesetas for the ABMT and 2.5 million for the PBSC. The greatest cost observed in the ABMT was due to these patients requiring longer hospitalization, greater transfusion support and longer antibiotic treatment.

Although the collection of hematopoietic progenitors and pretransplant evaluation are less expensive in autologous bone marrow transplantation, the early morbidity is higher than that of peripheral blood stem cell transplantation or mixed autotrasplanted of bone marrow and circulating progenitors thus resulting in higher costs.