Aplastic Anemia

The Transplantation Procedure

What medical tests and exams happen before a stem cell transplant?

Your doctors will want to make sure you're healthy enough to have a stem cell transplant. They also will want to find out whether you have any medical problems that could cause complications after the transplant. You may have:

Blood Tests

Before a stem cell transplant, you might have blood tests to check for HIV, herpes, pregnancy, and other conditions. These tests help your doctors learn about your overall health.

Chest X-Ray and Lung Function Tests

Biting into the Elephant

I believe that a story is the shortest distance between two people. While this is my story, it is not just mine, and I did not do any of this alone. In April 1983, my husband Joe and I were 25 years old and attending to the required pre-marital blood work. Next thing we knew, we were sitting in a doctor’s office because my blood counts were abnormally low. They told us there was something wrong, but they didn’t know what it was.

Clear Communication with Your Provider

Today, limited appointment times, overwhelming and confusing volumes of information available on the Internet, coupled with the stress of having a rare disease diagnosis, might mean patients don't always get the answers they need to make informed decisions about their care. Clear communication can  have a positive impact on patient satisfaction, treatment adherence, and self-management.  Improving communication in any relationship is helped by respect for each other and the ability to manage expectations.

Kirk R. Schultz, MD

Institution
British Columbia Children’s Hospital
Physician Status
accepting new patients
Primary Disease Area of Focus
Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML)
Aplastic Anemia
Myelodysplastic Syndromes (MDS)
Myeloproliferative Neoplasms (MPN)
Pediatric
About
Dr. Kirk Schultz is a Professor at the University of British Columbia, BC Children’s Hospital, and the Child and Family research Institute (CFRI) who has published over 130 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals. He is a Pediatric Hematologist/Oncologist focused on new therapies and rejection in Blood and Marrow Transplantation (BMT) and immune therapy of blood cancers.Dr. Schultz was the recipient of the CIHR/Wyeth Clinical Research Chair in Transplantation and is past chair of the Pediatric BMT Consortium the largest children’s BMT clinical trials group in the world. He was recently

Daria Babushok, MD, PhD

Institution
Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania
Physician Status
accepting new patients
Primary Disease Area of Focus
Aplastic Anemia
Myeloproliferative Neoplasms (MPN)
Paroxysmal Nocturnal Hemoglobinuria (PNH)
About
Daria Babushok’s research is focused on understanding the genetic changes that can arise in the bone marrow of patients with aplastic anemia, and on how they affect the patients’ prognosis and treatment outcomes. Dr. Babushok has completed a clinical hematology-oncology fellowship at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, and is currently a junior physician-scientist investigator at the University of Pennsylvania under the mentorship of Dr. Monica Bessler. In a study recently published in the journal of Cancer Genetics and conducted with the support of the AA&MDS International

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