Donor Questions Should Be Expanded
Asking questions is standard for collecting data to match bone marrow donors and recipients. But how to ask those questions can vary by the ethnicity of the patient.
That's the conclusion of researchers at UC San Francisco and Stanford University, based on data gathered for a new study.
Typically, clinicians gather information for potential matches by asking questions about a patient's ethnic background. But the study – which vetted 1,752 potential donors to the nationwide bone marrow registry – found that asking about someone's geographic background sometimes is more effective in matching up donors. Altogether, nearly one in five of those surveyed had inconsistent responses between their ethnic background and their actual geographic ancestry.
The reason is that self-identity is not always tied to biology, researchers concluded.
“No measure of self-identification shows complete correspondence with genetic ancestry,” the wrote in the study, which appeared in the online journal PLOS. “In certain cases geographic ancestry reporting matches genetic ancestry not reflected in race/ethnicity identification, but in other cases geographic ancestries show little correspondence to genetic measures, with important differences by gender. However, when respondents assign ancestry to grandparents, we observe sub-groups of individuals with well- defined genetic ancestries, including important differences in (gene) frequencies, with implications for transplant matching.”
In order for a bone marrow transplant to be successful, the patient and donor must be a genetic match for 10 specific characteristics – five different genes, with two copies apiece.
“The United States census uses a “check all that apply” technique, which is OK, but we want to try to get a little more refined to improve our matching efficiency,” said Martin Maiers, director of Bioinformatics Research at the NMDP/Be The Match Registry and co-author of the study. “Better matching means better outcomes for transplant patients.”
