Inherited platelet disorders (IPDs) are a heterogeneous group of conditions that present significant challenges in diagnosis and management. Here, we report two cases of patients presenting with clinically significant bleeding but with unclear etiologies by conventional clinical laboratory testing. Further evaluation, utilizing a combination of high-dimensional multiplexed mass cytometry and genetic sequencing, revealed the underlying causes of bleeding in both cases, leading to definitive diagnoses. These cases underscore the potential utility of combined multimodal approaches in evaluating patients with bleeding disorders. Moreover, these high-parameter methods can offer substantial mechanistic insights and can enhance our understanding of the molecular pathogenesis of IPDs. Future studies involving larger patient cohorts are needed to further validate this strategy, directly comparing its diagnostic yield and accuracy with current clinical laboratory testing approaches, which can ultimately improve patient care.
To document the results of outpatient hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) from the peripheral blood (PB) of sibling donors without anti-thymocyte globulin (ATG) in the conditioning regimen.
Patients from a low-income population with severe AA who received a PB, unmanipulated sibling HLA-identical HSCT between 2000 and 2020 at a single institution were studied. Survival was the primary outcome.
Forty-one transplants were performed. Time between diagnosis and transplant was five months (1–104). Median age was 37 (range, 4–61) years; 25 (61 %) recipients were males and 32 (78 %) had treatment failure, 9 (22 %) have not received treatment. ATG was administered in 5 (12.2 %) cases; the graft source was PB in 38 (92.7 %) transplants. Twenty-six (63.4 %) transplants were carried out in the outpatient setting. Infections developed in 14 (34.1 %) patients. Primary graft failure (GF) occurred in 3 (7.3 %) patients. The 15-year OS was 81 %, EFS was 77.4 %. Patients with high pre-HSCT transfusion burden had lower OS (p = 0.035) and EFS (p = 0.026). Previous treatment failure and age were not associated with lower OS (p = 0.115, p = 0.069) or EFS (p = 0.088, p = 0.5, respectively).
HLA-identical T-cell replete outpatient HSCT from the PB of sibling donors for AA patients using ATG-free conditioning offers excellent long-term survival.
The red cell distribution width (RDW) is a standard variable reported in the complete blood count. It has been found to have a consistent relationship to life expectancy in older individuals, prognosis in patients with cardiovascular disease, outcome in those with hematological and non-hematological neoplasms and in a variety of medical circumstances such as non-cardiovascular or cancer related critical illness and postoperative outcome from various procedures. This report reviews some of the key medical publications establishing these relationships with RDW. The precise pathobiological processes that explain the predictive value of the RDW in this wide array of circumstances or why an alteration in erythropoiesis (exaggerated red cell size variation) occurs is uncertain. The possible role of inflammation has been one hypothesis considered, but not established.