REPRESENTATION OF HISPANICS IN THE NATIONAL MARROW DONOR PROGRAM

Since less than one-third of patients in need of a BMT find related do nors, most patients will rely on registries of volunteer donors, For p atients from minority ethnic groups the chances of finding matched unr elated donors are lower, in part due to the smaller representation of minorities in the registries. Our purpose was to determine the represe ntation of Hispanics in the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP), the largest registry of volunteer marrow donors in the United States, We a nalyzed a database provided by the NMDP that contained information on minorities, The number of Hispanic volunteer donors has increased 110- fold in the last 6 years. The proportion of Hispanics in the registry has also increased from 1.1% to 6%, Nevertheless, the proportion of Hi spanic patients that received unrelated marrow transplants facilitated by the NMDP has increased only from 2.8% to 3.9% since 1989, Only 19. 7% of the formal searches initiated by Hispanic patients resulted in t ransplants compared to the 30.4% observed in the Caucasian population, Despite increments in the number and proportion of Hispanic volunteer donors, the proportion of Hispanics that receive BMT from unrelated d onors remains low, We conclude that, in addition to increased recruitm ent efforts, other strategies will be necessary in order to find enoug h marrow donors to meet the needs of the Hispanic population.