[Bone marrow transplantation for severe aplastic anemia]

Severe aplastic anemia is a hematological disease with a high mortality rate, for which bone marrow transplantation is the treatment of choice, specially in children and young adults. The number of transfusions undergone before the transplant is the most important factor to predict the possibility of graft failure. Twenty patients with severe aplastic anemia, most of them already multiple transfused, were transplanted utilizing cyclophosphamide combined with antilymphocyte globulin as a conditioning regiment. All the evaluable patients engrafted and there were no episodes of graft failure. Three patients died, and 17 (85%) are alive with hematopoietic recovery at a median of 27.7 months post-transplant. Bone marrow transplantation was an excellent therapeutic option in this series of patients with severe aplastic anemia and the conditioning regiment appeared to be sufficiently myeloablative and immunosuppressive to avoid early or late graft failure.