According to a recent article published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, long-term survivors of stem cell transplants have greater medical needs than the general public. However, overall rates of subsequent illness and hospitalization did not increase in these survivors compared to their counterparts. Some people experience lung problems after a transplant. They can happen if you have chronic GVHD or if you have had many infections during or after treatment.
Lung problems may also be related to the conditioning treatment you received before your transplant. Common short-term side effects immediately after cell transplantation have been fatigue, headache and nausea. These effects usually go away within 1 to 2 hours. Side effects can occur at any time, immediately after, or days or months after a stem cell transplant.
Short-term (acute) side effects usually occur within the first 100 days after a stem cell transplant. Long-term (chronic) side effects usually appear 100 days or more after the transplant. Most side effects go away on their own or can be treated, but some side effects may last a long time or become permanent. Stem cell therapies have the potential to treat many conditions, but so far there is little evidence that they do.
Even so, clinics around the world offer stem cell-based treatments for a range of medical problems. New research warns that some of these treatments may not be effective and, in fact, may cause harm sometimes many years later. Mucositis (inflammation or sores in the mouth) is a short-term side effect that can occur with chemotherapy and radiation. It usually gets better a few weeks after treatment, but it can make eating and drinking very painful.
Infertility, which means you can't get pregnant or get a woman pregnant when you want. May have fewer long-term side effects if chemotherapy before transplant is less intense. People who receive less potent chemotherapy tend to have fewer long-term effects. Most trials enrolled small numbers of patients and reported short-term follow-up results, leading to inconclusive and inconsistent results in detecting significant differences in severe adverse clinical events between the cellular and control groups.
Repeated therapy with autologous bone marrow mononuclear cells in patients with large myocardial infarction. Stem cell clinics in North America and around the world have been criticized for announcing unproven therapies to patients. This meta-analysis suggests that LVEF in short-term follow-up after cell therapy could affect long-term cardiovascular outcomes. Individual studies were not sufficiently potent to detect significant differences in major adverse clinical events between the cell therapy group and the control group.
All-cause mortality occurred in 4.4% (10 deaths in 226 patients) in the cell therapy group and in 9.5% (22 deaths in 232 patients) in the control group. Consequently, cell therapy trials should be conducted for high-risk patients with AMI to clearly address the clinical benefits of the new therapeutic modality. Osteoporosis (or thinning of the bones) is a common problem for many people as they age, but it is more likely to occur after a stem cell transplant. Graft failure is more common when the patient and donor are not well matched and when patients receive stem cells that have had their T cells removed.
Post-transplant lymphoproliferative disorder (PTSD) is an uncontrolled growth of lymph cells, actually a type of lymphoma, that can develop after an allogeneic stem cell transplant. For at least the first 6 weeks after the transplant, until the new stem cells begin to produce white blood cells (graft), you can easily get serious infections. As Lanza explained, because of these problems, scientists interested in embryonic stem cell therapy have tended to focus on sites in the body that do not normally produce a strong immune response. .
