CMLSupport: November Designated Marrow Awareness Month

"Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."
— Flannery O'Connor

November Designated National Marrow Awareness Month

MINNEAPOLIS, Nov. 1 — The National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) announces November is National Marrow Awareness Month, an annual nationwide campaign dedicated to recruiting volunteer blood stem cell donors and increasing patient awareness of the option of unrelated transplantation.

The NMDP matches patients who do not have matching donors in their family with volunteers willing to donate their blood stem cells (marrow, peripheral blood and umbilical cord).

Donor Recruitment

Click here to learn about the Second Annual Marrowthon, a Second Chances Saturdays event.

This year's National Marrow Awareness Month will feature "Second Chances Saturdays." Each Saturday in November, NMDP Donor Centers throughout the country will hold donor recruitment drives. "Second Chances Saturdays" is an opportunity for people to learn about blood stem cell donation and join the NMDP's Registry of potential volunteer donors.

Of utmost urgency is the need for more minorities to join the Registry. Transplants require matching certain tissue traits of the donor to the patient; because these traits are inherited, the most likely donor will come from the person's same racial or ethnic group. Because minorities only make up 25 percent of the Registry, they are less likely than Caucasians to find a matched donor.

Joining the Registry is easy: anyone between the ages of 18 and 60 and in good general health can join the Registry by completing a medical history form and giving a small blood sample so his/her tissue type can be identified. Those who join the Registry are asked to remain committed to donating for any patient, anywhere in the world. This commitment can mean the difference between life and death for the patient.

Patient Education

Each year, more than 30,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with life-threatening diseases, like leukemia, treatable only by a blood stem cell transplant. Only 30% of these patients will have a suitably matched donor in their family — the other 70% must rely on strangers.

Although the NMDP facilitates more than 140 transplants a month, many patients still don't know about this treatment option. The NMDP has many resources available to help patients and medical professionals understand the process of finding unrelated blood stem cells: from understanding a disease, to searching for a donor, to securing financial resources.

Preliminary searches of the Registry are free to licensed physicians for their patients.

For patient and medical professional resources, to find the NMDP Donor Center near you or for other information: 1-800-MARROW-2 or visit the Web site.

Source: National Marrow Donor Program

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