I was watching a tv report about a girl who needed a bone marrow donor but was unable to find a match. Her father said it was hard to find one because she was biracial. Her father is Black and her mother is Asian. My question is, does it matter what race it is for a bone marrow transplant? If so, for biracial people does it matter if the donor is a match such as Black-White to Black-White for does only one half matter such as Black-White to White-Asian?
Things like organs and marrow have a MUCH stricter criteria for matching than, say, blood. Often even the prospective recipients own parents and siblings don’t match. The chances of someone of a different race matching are nil. Hence mixed race people will have a harder time finding a match because there is a smaller pool of possibles to draw from.
The HLA’s (human lucocyte antigens sp?) in people’s blood are what determine bone marrow compatability.
Asians have at list one dissimilar HLA thus making it much more difficult to find a match. When I was volunteering at the UBMDR we always had specific campaigns targeted at the asian population.
Potentially, the couple in question would have to have another child to have any real possibility of getting a match. Finally, unless the parents are brother and sister they will have almost no chance of matching their child.
Just as an aside, blood types between donor and receipient DON’T have to match for the dontation to be viable, however, typically the receipient’s blood type will change to that of the donor after the dontation. Sometimes eye color will change as well. It’s really quite an amazing thing.
So is it just the Asian ancestry that’s making it difficult to find a match? Or is it even more difficult for a biracial patient than for a purely Asian patient?
As far as I know, it’s Asian ancestry in the USA that’s the problem. “Race” has far fewer real genetic markers than popular culture deludes us into thinking.
It’s the mixed ancestry with the Asian component that causes the difficulty.
An asian person could receive a donation from an unrelated asian donor with no trouble, assuming they could find one.
apparently (I don’t have the statistics in front of me) asian populations experience leukemia and aplastic aniema - things that can be treated by BMD - less often than other races making it less of an issue in the general asian population.
Our campaigns always aimed to show that asians DO get these illnesses (even if it is in smaller numbers) and ONLY other asians could donate to them.
The ‘biracial’ thing is misleading. When trying to match tissue closely, the most likely results come from the same population clusters as the tissue recipient. “Biracial” will mix up the population clusters significantly, making for a more difficult match. But then so will a person who’s half Irish and half southern italian.
Inbreeding can have its upside, it seems.