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@katgob

I was asked to participate in a study. Taing Itacitinib as a way to help with the graft vs host disease. There are 20 patients in this study. One is for 60 days and one for 90. I looked it up and found info on National library of medicine. It is late, so i will read it tomorrow. This hospital lives to do research like this. My only question will be if this drug affects my blood for the long term. Once time has passed, I want to donate blood or platelets again. If all heals well, I could.
He was talking about this is my call with him. I would have preferred a video visit, bit my blood draw took too long. He spoke of a drug that is to work to make the GVHD less likely to be a problem.

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Replies to "I was asked to participate in a study. Taing Itacitinib as a way to help with..."

Good morning, @katgob, it’s great you’re participating in a study. I was in several myself. It’s our way of being able to assist in the forward growth of cancer treatments.

Graft vs Host Disease or GVHD is a side effect of a bone marrow transplant. To help you understand what that is a little clearer, when a person has a solid organ transplant, they will be on immunosuppressants (anti-rejection drugs) for the rest of their life so that their immune system doesn’t reject the organ.
When we a bone marrow transplant, we’re getting someone else’s immune system (the graft) and it wants to reject our body (the host). It looks as our body as an invading organism and wants to do what any healthy immune system does…take out the offender! Eventually, we are able to get off immunosuppressants as our new immune system learns to recognize the foreign proteins in our body. But in the meantime, it can create some issues and the new graft needs to be suppressed or held back from being hyper active for a while.
That’s where the Itacitinib comes into play. It is an immunosuppressant used for mild GVHD. This will be a really good trial for you to be involved in.

I strongly suggest not reading too much information about the drugs you’ll be taking. I know knowledge is power but in this case, reading about these meds can put fear in you that isn’t warranted.

As for donating blood in the future. That you’ll have to check with your doctor. My transplant doctor told me that is off the table for me. I cannot donate blood or blood products.

@katgob, we should move our conversations out of this discussion about bone marrow biopsies, over to this discussion about Bone Marrow Transplant stories. I’m going to copy and past this reply over there so we can keep it in the right place.

See you over here! https://connect.mayoclinic.org/discussion/my-bone-marrow-transplant-bmt-story-will-you-share-yours/