A four-year-old boy suffering from severe aplastic anemia – attacking his bone marrow – has been saved by the first transplant of its kind to have been performed in Portugal.
Doctors used stem cells harvested from the child’s own umbilical cord to kick-start his body back to generating the correct amount of blood cells.
The little boy – who by the time he was operated was being treated at Lisbon IPO cancer hospital with regular sessions of chemotherapy – is now ‘recovering well, and returning to the hospital for regular check-ups’.
“His recovery is within what we hoped for this kind of transplant”, said hematologist Alexandra Machado.
It apparently took only a month from the operation last April for the child to be allowed home and back to a relatively normal life.
Stem-cell transplants have become commonplace as has the practice of parents freezing their children’s umbilical cords (in case they are needed in later life), but as cancer specialist Nuno Miranda explained “it is a rarity among rarities” that children end up being treated by their own stem cells.
“We have had many cases of children with frozen stem cells in which we tell parents: “Okay, freeze them but they may not be able to be used” – the reason being that the children may be born with the cells of the disease that they go on to manifest.
But in this case, the child was ‘lucky’. Aplastic anemia is not a condition people are born with but one that results from a viral infection/ exposure to toxic products/ certain medication or “the result of autoimmune reactions”.
The pioneering surgery was performed at Lisbon IPO’s Bone Marrow transplant unit.
