Representation of Hispanics in the National Marrow Donor Program

Since less than one-third of patients in need of a BMT find related donors, most patients will rely on registries of volunteer donors. For patients from minority ethnic groups the chances of finding matched unrelated donors are lower, in part due to the smaller representation of minorities in the registries. Our purpose was to determine the representation of Hispanics in the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP), the largest registry of volunteer marrow donors in the United States. We analyzed a database provided by the NMDP that contained information on minorities. The number of Hispanic volunteer donors has increased 110-fold in the last 6 years. The proportion of Hispanics in the registry has also increased from 1.1% to 6%. Nevertheless, the proportion of Hispanic patients that received unrelated marrow transplants facilitated by the NMDP has increased only from 2.8% to 3.9% since 1989. Only 19.7% of the formal searches initiated by Hispanic patients resulted in transplants compared to the 30.4% observed in the Caucasian population. Despite increments in the number and proportion of Hispanic volunteer donors, the proportion of Hispanics that receive BMT from unrelated donors remains low. We conclude that, in addition to increased recruitment efforts, other strategies will be necessary in order to find enough marrow donors to meet the needs of the Hispanic population.