Late June brought news focusing on transplantation of a bone and transplantation of bone marrow.
In what is believed to be the first operation of its kind, surgeons reported that they transplanted into a six-year-old boy a cadaver humerus that—because its blood supply was intact—is expected to grow along with the boy. Without the blood supply, the cadaver bone would stay the same size. To replace the boy's cancerous right arm, surgeons at Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital in Hollywood, Florida, fused the new humerus to a piece of the boy's own fibula. The procedure was performed in September, and last month the boy used his arm to throw a baseball at a press conference at the hospital.
A report published on June 15 in Blood indicates that bone marrow transplants (BMTs) before puberty can compromise patients' final height (1999;93:4109-4115). Investigators from a number of European countries studied 181 patients with aplastic anemia, leukemias, and lymphomas who had BMTs before puberty. "An overall decrease in final height standard deviation score value was found compared with the height at BMT and with the genetic height. Girls did better than boys, and the younger in age the person was at the time of BMT, the greater the loss in height," wrote the investigators, led by Amnon Cohen, MD, of Genoa, Italy. A total of 140 of the patients reached an adult height within the normal range of the general population.
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