What are types of Donors fro BMT?
One of the first evaluations done for patients who are being considered for a BMT involves special blood studies on the patient and his or her entire family in order to decide who is the best donor. The standard test is called tissue typing (also referred to as HLA or histocompatibility typing). A second test, which has recently been developed, is called high resolution DNA typing. These tests gauge how much the donor and recipient cells will recognize one another as the same or different. The greater the differences in the HLA typing, the greater the chance that either the donor’s cells will not grow in the recipient (rejection or graft failure) or they will attack the recipient and cause a reaction called graft vs. host disease (GVHD).
