In a small number of patients, infusions of unirradiated donor leukocytes were an effective treatment for EBV-associated lymphoproliferative disease that arose after allogeneic bone marrow transplantation.
Chronic graft-versus-host disease (cGVHD) is the leading cause of late treatmentrelated deaths among recipients of allogeneic bone marrow and blood transplants. However, cGVHD is also associated with fewer relapses. We sought to determine whether severity of cGVHD predicts the magnitude of these effects. One impediment to such an analysis is the current limited/extensive grading system for cGVHD because this classification was designed to identify patients likely to benefit from systemic immune suppression and does not capture the severity of multiorgan involvement. We, therefore, first developed a grading system predictive for survival by using data from 1827 HLAmatched sibling allotransplant recipients reported to the International Bone Marrow Transplant Registry (IBMTR). We found Karnofsky performance score, diarrhea, weight loss, and cutaneous and oral involvement to be independent prognostic variables, from which we generated a grading scheme. We tested this scheme, the limited/extensive classification sys-
A B S T R A C T PurposeTransplantation-related mortality (TRM) is a major barrier to the success of allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT).
Patients and MethodsWe assessed changes in the incidence of TRM and overall survival from 1985 through 2004 in 5,972 patients younger than age 50 years who received myeloablative conditioning and HCT for acute myeloid leukemia (AML) in first complete remission (CR1) or second complete remission (CR2).
ResultsAmong HLA-matched sibling donor transplantation recipients, the relative risks (RRs) for TRM were 0.5 and 0.3 for 2000 to 2004 compared with those for 1985 to 1989 in patients in CR1 and CR2, respectively (P Ͻ .001). The RRs for all causes of mortality in the latter period were 0.73 (P ϭ .001) and 0.60 (P ϭ .005) for the CR1 and CR2 groups, respectively. Among unrelated donor transplantation recipients, the RRs for TRM were 0.73 (P ϭ .095) and 0.58 (P Ͻ .001) for 2000 to 2004 compared with those in 1990 to 1994 in the CR1 and CR2 groups, respectively. Reductions in mortality were observed in the CR2 group (RR, 0.74; P ϭ .03) but not in the CR1 group.
ConclusionOur results suggest that innovations in transplantation care since the 1980s and 1990s have reduced the risk of TRM in patients undergoing allogeneic HCT for AML and that this reduction has been accompanied by improvements in overall survival.
J Clin
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