The socioeconomic background of the donor may affect the prospects of patients who receive haematopoietic cell transplants, according to a new US study. Researchers said the findings are “quite remarkable”.
The study, led by researchers in Minnesota, has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers studied outcomes for 2,005 blood cancer patients treated in 125 hospitals in the USA.
They found a 9.7 percentage-point difference in overall survival between patients who received transplants from the wealthiest quartile of donors compared to those who received them from the poorest quartile.
Receiving a transplant from a donor in the poorest quartile was linked to a 6.6 percentage-point increase in the risk of dying from transplant related issues within three years.
The study found no connection with the demographic status of the recipient, in contrast to previous research.
The observed health disparity may “be encoded on a cellular level and might persist through transplantation,” the researchers say. They now plan to seek ways to offset the effects they have found.
Researcher Dr Lucie Turcotte, a paediatric haematologist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, said: “Our findings are quite remarkable. We have shown that social disadvantage penetrates so deeply that it is actually transplantable into a new host, and its effects persist over time.
“The importance of these findings reach far beyond cancer and bone marrow transplant care — they demonstrate the profound health effects of social inequality and highlight the critical need for public health interventions.”
Source:
Turcotte LM, Wang T, Beyer KM, Cole SW, Spellman SR, Allbee-Johnson M, Williams E, Zhou Y, Verneris MR, Rizzo JD, Knight JM. (2024) “The health risk of social disadvantage is transplantable into a new host.” PNAS, 15 July 2024, doi: 10.1073/pnas.2404108121.
Link: https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2404108121
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