Diseases Treated with BMT

If your child has been diagnosed with cancer or other condition that affects the blood, your child’s doctors may recommend a bone marrow or stem cell transplant. These conditions include various types of leukemia, which is the most common childhood cancer, and some non-cancerous disorders, such as aplastic anemia. Transplants are also used to treat some solid tumors in children, including neuroblastoma.

At Seattle Cancer Care Alliance’s Pediatric Clinical Hematopoietic Cell Transplant Service, we use bone marrow or stem cell transplants to treat the following conditions:

Leukemia
Leukemia is a cancer of the blood and the most common childhood cancer. There are several types, including:

• Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL)
• Acute myelogenous leukemia (AML)
• Acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL)
• Chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML)
• Myelodysplastic syndrome.

Other cancers
Bone marrow and stem cell transplants are also used to treat other types of cancer that occur in children, including:

• Lymphoma
• Brain tumors
• Neuroblastoma
• Ewing's Sarcoma
• Wilms’ Tumor. 

Non-cancerous conditions
We also use transplants to treat other conditions that affect the blood but are not cancer. These include

• Severe aplastic anemia
• Sickle cell anemia
• Other hereditary blood disorders
• Immunodeficiency syndromes
• Inborn errors of metabolism 
• Autoimmune disorders.

May 2007