Bone Marrow Transplant & Donation Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Bone Marrow Transplant & Donation - Essay Example ICU stay would usually be hectic with frequent monitoring, institution of mechanical ventilation, renal replacement therapy and continuous infusions. The conditions for doing bone marrow transplantations, selecting the donor if doing allogeneic transplants, the actual surgery, the prevention of immune suppression after the surgery and ensuring the survival of the patient have heightened the risk of the ominous event that is bone transplantation. This paper is exploring the biological features including the anatomy and physiology of bone transplantation investigated in the various researches. Initially the normal anatomy and physiology have been described so that the reader gets a better picture of what is intended by this research. Normal anatomy and physiology of bone marrow The soft tissue that lies in the spaces between the bone trabeculae of flat bones is bone marrow. Blood vessels, nervous tissue, phagocytes, stem cells and blood cells at different stages of maturation are found in the bone marrow (Elgazzar, 2004). The red marrow has hemopoietic cells which are active while the yellow marrow is mainly fat and hemopoietically inactive. The bone marrow is essential to the human life as it provides all the blood cells: red blood cells, white blood cells and the platelets. The manufacture of the blood cells depends on the needs of the body. Active bone marrow is found mostly in the flat bones of the vertebrae (28%), pelvis (34%), the cranium together with the mandible (13%), the ribs and the sternum, (10%) and the proximal ends of the femur and humerus (4%-8%) (Elgazzar, 2004). The manufacture of blood cells is termed hemopoiesis. It begins in the human body at the fourth month of the intra-uterine life of the fetus. Within two months it functions more than the liver in the hematopoietic action. By birth, the red bone marrow becomes fully responsible for the blood cell formation. The cartilaginous epiphyses which did not have the red bone marrow at birth soon had it in the first few months of life (Elgazzar, 2004). The adult bone has active red marrow in the various bones different proportions. The usual conversion of red marrow is to the yellow marrow. However in certain pathological conditions, the reverse process occurs. Alterations to the distribution of the red marrow could change in conditions which are traumatic to the human body like surgeries, trauma or infections or malignancy (Elgazzar, 2004). Immune response Lymphocytes were the natural killer (NK) cells which were significant role players in the immune responses, both innate and adaptive (Olson et al, 2009). Lymphocytes provided the response to virus attacks, microbes and some tumors. The NK cells were white blood cells produced in the bone marrow and then moved to the region of the spleen, liver, lung, blood and lymph nodes where they resided (Olson et al, 2009). The period of maturity from a bone cell precursor to maturity came to 28 days. When an attack from viruses or mi crobes or tumors occurred, signals reached the NK cells which then migrated to the sites of attack through the expression of inflammatory chemokine receptors by virtue of their homing behavior (Olson et al, 2009). At the key sites, the NK cells entered the lymphoid tissue in the lymph nodes and non-lymphoid tissue in