[Pauillac]

How long to know result of stem cell transplant?

by Pauillac on Mon Sep 11, 2017 6:24 pm

As I posted in some other threads, my wife has completed her stem cell transplant two weeks ago.

She is now doing a basic blood test twice a week to confirm that her WBC is still getting better.

We have an appointment for the end of the month and she will do a serum protein electro­phoresis (SPEP) right before. By mistake our lab did run a SPEP last week. My wife had an M-spike of 3.0 g/dL (30 g/l) before her stem cell transplant, and in this recent SPEP the spike was 1.3 g/dL (13 g/l). Our hematologist told us that it was to soon and that we should ignore this test.

How soon can we reliably know the result of the autologous stem cell transplant?

My understanding (but I am not hematologist) would be that bone marrow is just starting again to produce some proteins (good and bad), so that M-protein level could only increase between now and end of month which means that she would end up with a M spike level above 1.3 g/dL, which wouldn't be such a great response!

Or could it be possible that the M proteins detected during this SPEP were created before the transplant and will be slowly evacuated and hopefully not replaced if the bone marrow is free of myeloma cells?

Would rather prefer option 2, but I am really unsure how this all works.

Thanks for your advice.

[Mike F]

Re: How long to know result of stem cell transplant?

by Mike F on Tue Sep 12, 2017 10:22 am

I think day 100 post-transplant is a common time point at which the success of the transplant is evaluated. In my case, I still had a low but detectable M-spike at that time. Over the course of another six months or so, it went down to an undetectable level. So for me, anyway, it took quite a while before it really took full effect in terms of M-proteins.