I am American (White), and my wife is Okinawan. We had a good friend who was “half” and had some sort of bone cancer, where he needed a marrow transplant. (I think that’s right, I am not clear on the details.)
He once told my wife something along the lines that because he was half, neither of his parents were close enough to be a donor, and, similarly, he faced extra difficulty in finding a donor. (Again, I am not sure of the details, so mistakes in this description are mine - it’s very possible I misunderstood something).
Now this is something my wife has started to worry about if we have children.
Anyway, she asked me and I thought it sounded like a good question for the Dope.
So, tell me, are bi-racial individuals harder to get transplant / donor matches for? In fact, are there special medical considerations in general for us to be aware of?
First off, IANAD, YMMV, etc., the usual disclaimers.
There may be a small amount of validity to your wife’s concern. I get the impression that there is still a lot of debate in the transplant community about various aspects of their work, but here is one opinion:
Beyond that, it’s not unheard of for people not related to one another to match when family members do not or cannot. All the same, the chances that one of your children will need a transplant are small. That they would need a transplant, and would be hard to match to because they had parents from both sides of the Pacific are far smaller.
One has a better chance at matching when the donor is from the same gene pool. Race is one factor in ones gene pool, so racially mixed individuals come from diverse pools.
But the real difficulty is in finding willing donors. There are fewer non-white volunteer donors in general.
As far as having children who might someday need a donor, you have an easy out. At birth, cord blood can be collected and stored for future use. It contains the types of cells needed to regenerate bone marrow. It can be stored for an extended period of time.
I hope this helps. I don’t Google. My cite is my thirty plus years in nursing, 5 of which were in bone marrow transplantation research.
I told my wife about saving the birth cord, and she said she saw something about that on TV here the other day. That sounds like something worth looking into.
I do hope you will be able to successfully save the cord blood. We tried both times at the births of our Japanese/British children, but both times it proved to be impossible. The first time, in 1996, the only places doing it in Japan were in the Tokyo area, and we gave birth in Hokkaido. The second time in 2000 was an emergency cesarean for placenta previa, in which I was losing too much blood to allow the technician in to collect the cord blood. Sigh…
We were also told that as we were giving birth at a public university hospital, we would not be able to have exclusive use of the cord blood, that it would be earmarked for us but if a sick child with a match turned up first, we would have to give it up to that child. We agreed with that; it would be dreadful to refuse a chance of health to another kid on the offchance that we might want it some day.
When we decided to bank the cord blood, my mother was a possible candidate for stem-cell transplant for MS. However, the clinical trials didn’t look promising and she decided not to try it. (Cord blood is loaded with stem cells and since Mom and the blood type would’ve been usable since she and I are both A+, and Airman is type O+.) So, Aaron’s cord blood is banked for his specific use if he needs it, God forbid.
You win some and you lose some. It might be more difficult to find a donor. However, there is a positive.
To “get” an autosomal recessive disease, both of your parents must be carriers for the disease, and you have to be unlucky. Statistically speaking, 25% of offspring will not get the gene, 50% will be carriers (but not have the disease), and 25% will have the disease. If only one of your parents is a carrier, you cannot get the disease, although you have a 50% chance of becoming a carrier.
Many genetic diseases are not evenly distributed - they are very prevalent in one or two populations and much less so in others. This is why marrying your cousin isn’t such a great idea, even if she is cute :D. The further apart (genetically) you are with your partner, the less chance that you two will share a common recessive gene, and the less chance that your children will get a recessive disease.