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The news often comes as a shock to families, and the search for stem cell donors is a race against time: around 700 children and young people in Germany are diagnosed with blood cancer every year, according to the Tübingen organization DKMS, which registers potential stem cell donors.
Blood cancer is therefore the most common malignant disease in children.
For some of those affected, a stem cell transplant is the last hope.
Finding a suitable donor is often difficult.
If it succeeds, the children and young people would have a good chance of being cured.
It is important that many healthy people register as donors.
The DKMS urgently calls for this on World Childhood Cancer Day on February 15th.
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"In the past few decades, there have been great advances in the treatment of most malignant diseases that occur in children and adolescents," said Peter Bader, head of the stem cell transplant department at the Clinic for Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine at the University Hospital in Frankfurt am Main.
Especially with acute lymphatic leukemia (ALL), the most common malignant disease in this age group, up to 90 percent of patients could now be cured.
But: "For some of them, a stem cell transplant is necessary for a definitive cure." If no suitable donor can be found in the family circle, the patients are dependent on donors to whom they are not related.
And that is exactly where the challenge lies: The tissue characteristics of the donor must match those of the patient as closely as possible so that there are no complications during the transplantation, according to the DKMS.
Outpatient donation is possible in most cases
There are more than 35,000 variants of these traits, occurring in millions of different combinations.
It is therefore important to be able to check a large selection when looking for a suitable donor.
Any healthy person between the ages of 17 and 55 can register with the DKMS as a potential stem cell donor.
All that is initially necessary for this is a swab of the cheek mucosa - a corresponding registration set is sent to potential donors by post.
"The requirements for donating to a child or an adult are the same," said Bader.
Also, according to the DKMS, only 10 percent of all stem cell donations are bone marrow extractions, which necessitate surgical intervention on the donor.
In 90 percent of cases, the stem cells are obtained through an outpatient procedure in which the required amount of stem cells is filtered out of the blood.
At the beginning of February, the experts at DKMS called for people to register as donors.
Because in the current year, around 125,000 potential donors would be eliminated from the stem cell donor file due to age.
DKMS stands for German Bone Marrow Donor File.
However, the organization operates globally.
Since 1991, DKMS has arranged more than 100,000 stem cell donations in 57 countries worldwide.
More than 7.4 million people from Germany and around four million international donors are currently listed in the file.
A lot at first glance, but finding a suitable donor is extremely difficult, even if the search is worldwide.
The same applies to stem cell donations: the more potential donors, the greater the choice and the higher the probability of finding a suitable donor.
Blood cancer, also known as leukemia, is a group of cancers of the blood-forming system.
According to the German Cancer Society, the individual forms differ greatly in terms of frequency, causes, treatment options and prospects of recovery.
The disease originates in the bone marrow cells and is usually characterized by a greatly increased number of white blood cells in the blood.
In Germany, one person is diagnosed with blood cancer every twelve minutes on average, and around 19,500 people die from the disease here every year.
yeah/dpa