Is autologous bone marrow transplant (ABMT) and high-dose chemotherapy an approach that can rescue some children with advanced cancer disease?

The object was to determine the role of ABMT in children with advanced canc er. Those included had failed to respond to conventional treatment with 4 d ifferent ablative chemotherapy regimens. Bone marrow stem cells were identi fied with CD34. Cellular viability was determined after the bone marrow ext raction and before the infusion. fifteen patients were included, whose ages ranged from 1 to 13 years old with a median of 7. Six had acute leukemia, 6 with primitive neuroectodermic tumors, and 3 with other tumors. The media n disease-free survival far the whole group was of 2 months, range of 1 to 29 months and SD of 10.1. A total of 6 children are alive (40%) and without evidence of tumor activity from 1 to 29 months. The disease-free survival rate for these group was of 19.1 months, with an SD of 7.9 months.