Peripheral blood stem cell transplantation compared with bone marrow transplantation from unrelated donors in patients with leukemia: A single institutional experience

We analyzed data for 89 patients with leukemia undergoing bone marrow transplantation (BMT) (n = 44) or peripheral blood stem cell transplantation (PBSCT) (n = 45) from unrelated donors between May 2000 and February 2009 in our institution. PBSCT resulted in faster hematopoietic engraftment, compared with BMT (P < 0.001). There was no difference between BMT and PBSCT in infectious episodes and CMV antigenemia within the first 100 days post-transplantation. The frequency of acute graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) grades II–IV was 49.7% and 47.0% (P = 0.838) and of chronic GVHD 42.4% and 43.9% (P = 0.827) in BMT and PBSCT. The 5-year cumulative percent of relapse was 18.5 in BMT and 48.6 in PBSCT (P = 0.041), and the transplant-related mortality (TRM) was 40% and 29.5% (P = 0.800), respectively. The 5-year cumulative percent of disease-free survival (DFS) was 50.8 and 38.9 (P = 0.439); overall survival (OS) was 55.3% and 48.5% (P = 0.447) in BMT and PBSCT, respectively. The reconstitution of T and B cells at 1, 3, 6, 9, and 12 months post-transplantation was not different between BMT and PBSCT, except that the level of regulatory T cells (T-regs) was higher after PBSCT than after BMT at 1 month (P = 0.001).