Aplastic Anaemia


What is Aplastic Anaemia?
Aplastic Anaemia is a serious condition where the bone marrow fails to produce enough blood cells to sustain life. This can happen at any age and results in severe anaemia, repeated life-threatening infections and/or bleeding. Also, this can progress to acute leukaemia or similar blood cancers.


What causes Aplastic Anaemia?
Several causes of aplastic anaemia have been documented, most important amongst them are:
• Infections- mostly viruses
• Drugs- numerous drugs can cause this occasionally, but certain drugs are
  more likely to cause this problem than others.
• Chemicals
• Certain diseases

However, most often, no definite cause for aplastic anaemia can be found. The immune system of the body for some unknown reason reacts against the bone marrow stem cells damaging them irreversibly.

Classification

Non-severe: the neutrophil (the cells that protect our body from infections) count is not low enough to cause repeated severe infections

Severe: Low neutrophil counts and the condition requires regular blood and platelet transfusions to sustain life.

Very severe: As above with very low neutrophil counts.


Can Aplastic Anaemia be inherited?
There are several inherited forms of Aplastic anaemia. They usually manifest in childhood, but it is not at all unusual to find these disorders in adults. The presentation is similar to that seen with acquired Aplastic Anaemia. However, these patients usually have other deformities in their bones, nails or skin.


Aplastic Anaemia in India
While the incidence of Aplastic Anaemia in USA or UK is less than 1 in a million people, in India the incidence is increased up to 10-20 times. The reason for this is not clear. Increased incidence of infections and unregulated exposure to drugs, environmental pollutants and chemicals, both might be responsible for the very high incidence of this condition in India

What is the treatment for Aplastic Anaemia?
Supportive treatment:
• Red cell transfusion
• Platelet transfusion
• Antibiotics for infection

Drug therapy to suppress the immune system
Anti-thymocyte globulin (an antibody produced in horse or rabbit against the human immune system ) in combination with cyclosporine.
• This results in improvement in blood counts in 60-70%.
• Half of those would need another course of this treatment.
• Severe and Very-severe Aplastic Anaemia do not respond well to this
  treatment

Bone marrow Transplantation (BMT)
This is the only curative treatment for aplastic anaemia. BMT can cure up to 80% of patients suffering from this condition. It is important to differentiate Inherited Aplastic Anaemia from acquired ones, as BMT has to be performed differently in the former; or else the outcome can be fatal.
 

WHAT DO WE OFFER:

• COMPREHENSIVE WORK-UP FOR DIAGNOSIS
• COUNSELLING TO THE PATIENT AND FAMILY
• PROVIDE A LONG-TERM TREATMENT PLAN
• FOLLOW-UP
• BMT COUNSELLING
• DEDICATED DAY-UNIT FOR BLOOD TRANSFUSION
• AVAILABILITY OF COMPLETE RANGE OF COMPONENTS
• WORK-UP FOR PATIENTS WHO HAVE DEVELOPED TRANSFUSION
    PROBLEMS
• ONLY CENTRE IN EASTERN INDIA TO PROVIDE LEUCOCYTE-DEPLETED
    BLOOD AS REQUIRED.
• OFFER BMT TO SUITABLE CANDIDATES FROM SEPTEMBER 2009