Likelihood of a Match

The Need

Every year, more than 10,000 patients in the U.S. are diagnosed with life-threatening diseases such as leukemia or lymphoma, and their best or only hope of a cure is a transplant from an-unrelated adult donor or umbilical cord blood unit.

Most patients (about 70 percent) in need of a transplant do not have a matching donor in their family. In 2011, nearly half of all patients in the U.S. received the unrelated transplant* they needed. *This is referring to receiving transplants, not finding matches.

Barriers to transplant include:

• lack of access to health care (no or limited insurance coverage)
• lack of timely referral for transplant, 
• decline in health status and 
• inability to find a matched donor or cord blood unit.  

Likelihood of a Match

More than 650,000 new potential donors joined in 2011 (down from nearly 723,000 in 2010); of those, nearly 40 percent were from diverse racial and ethnic communities.

A patient’s likelihood of having a donor on the Be The Match Registry who is willing and able to help save a life is estimated to range from 66 percent to 93 percent, depending on race or ethnicity (unchanged from 2010).

Race/Ethnicity Specific

• African American or Black patients only have an estimated 66 percent likelihood of having a donor on the Be The Match Registry who is willing and able to help save a life.

• Asian or Pacific Islander patients only have an estimated 73 percent likelihood of having a donor on the Be The Match Registry who is willing and able to help save a life.

• Hispanic or Latino patients only have an estimated 72 percent likelihood of having a donor on the Be The Match Registry who is willing and able to help save a life.

• White patients have an estimated 93 percent likelihood of having a donor on the Be The Match Registry who is willing and able to help save a life. 

• American Indian and Alaska Native patients have an estimated 82 percent likelihood of having a donor on the Be The Match Registry who is willing and able to help save a life.

*Cord blood plays a significant role in meeting the needs of transplant patients. Statistics on likelihood of a match including cord blood are in development and will be available at a future date. -NMDP

Composition of the Be The Match Registry by Race and Ethnicity

 The Be The Match Registry provides access to 9.5 million potential donors and nearly 165,000 cord blood units. Through partnerships with international registries, the NMDP provides additional access to approximately 9 million donors and 425,000 cord blood units.

Race/Ethnicity	Number and % Potential Adult Donors	Number and % Cord Blood Units
African American or Black	Nearly 685,000 7%	More than 12,000 7%
American Indian/Alaska Native	Nearly 106,000 1%	265 0.2%
Asian	Nearly 670,000 7%	Nearly 12,000 7%
White	More than 6.8 million 71%	More than 100,000 61%
Multiple Race	More than 340,000 4%	Nearly 15,000 9%
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander	Nearly 15,000 0.2%	150 0.1%
Hispanic or Latino	More than 940,000 10%	More than 29,000 18%

Donating Marrow, Peripheral Blood Stem Cells (PBSC) or Umbilical Cord Blood

A marrow or cord blood transplant replaces a patient’s unhealthy blood-forming cells with healthy ones. The cells used in transplants come from three sources: marrow, peripheral blood stem cells (PBSC) and umbilical cord blood.

When considering all three sources of cells, physicians currently request PBSC 60 percent of the time, marrow 19 percent of the time and cord blood 21 percent of the time. The NMDP facilitated more than 5,500 marrow and cord blood transplants in 2011 (about 300 more than 2010).    
       

The above information is from the the Be The Match Registry^®, operated by the National Marrow Donor Program^® (NMDP). The information has been edited for presentation on this blog.