ArmInfo.The first successful bone marrow transplantation operations in the South Caucasus region were held in Armenia. As the press secretary of the Ministry of Health of Armenia Anahit Aytayan told ArmInfo, two successful transplantations have already been carried out at the H. Yolyan Hematology Center in Yerevan. The first operation was carried out in April this year and two more similar operations are being prepared for myeloma patients.
According to Aytayan, bone marrow transplantation by this malignant tumor is carried out because the stem cells are taken from the patient himself, and therefore the patient does not need donor assistance. This procedure, called autotransplantation, requires careful preparation of the patient himself and the collection of his own hematopoietic stem cells. The spokeswoman noted that the process of collecting cells was carried out by a Russian transfusiologist from the St. Petersburg Institute of Pediatric Hematology and Transplantology after Raisa Gorbacheva Dmitry Pevtsov and a team of Armenian hematologists led by Professor Smbat Dagbashyan. The bone marrow transplantation is unprecedented for the countries of the South Caucasus. In the transplantation of stem cells to date in Armenia needs about 60 patients. High-tech transplantation is carried out in several stages, which include preparatory chemotherapy, bone marrow stimulation, collection of stem cells, their processing, freezing, drug preparation of the patient and the process of stem cell transplantation. The whole process can take a month or more, but autotransplantation allows you to cure previously considered incurable blood cancer. It should be recalled that in June 1999, the "Armenian Bone Marrow Register" was created in Armenia, which became a springboard for the preparation for the Bone Marrow Transplantation Center. Because of the peculiarities of the genetic structure of Armenians, it is almost impossible to detect the coincidence of donors and recipients in the database of existing international registries, and therefore the life of a large number of Armenian children and adults is threatened due to the lack of compatible donors. The existence of such an imbalance caused the creation in Armenia of a registry of voluntary donors of bone marrow transplantation, which will help to solve this problem, and later to begin the practice of performing bone marrow transplantation.