Clinical Bone Marrow and Blood Stem Cell Transplantation

Clinical Bone Marrow and Blood Stem Cell Transplantation, 2nd Edition
Edited by Kerry Atkinson
Cambridge University Press, Boston, MA, 2000; 1500 pages.

This book is the second edition of the very famous and popular text previously done by the same editor. It is a lively, robust, authoritative, and encyclopedic text on everything you could ever want to know about bone marrow transplantation - and more.

The overwhelming strength of this book is its authorship. The list of authors reads like a compendium of who's who in bone marrow transplantation, many of the authors being scientists and clinicians responsible for the major breakthroughs in the field. Each chapter, although very variable in size, is deep in scope, unbiased, and current. Chapters vary from text of 6 pages to those of more than 20 pages. The editor has obviously done much work to make the chapters flow, avoid excessive overlap from one to the next, and configure them into a chronology of transplantation.

As such, this book begins with the history of bone marrow transplantation, appropriately starting with a chapter by one of the earliest great leaders in the field, Dr. George Santos. With Dr. Santos' untimely death earlier this year, the chapter takes on great poignancy. The latter chapters of the book deal with the future. Each of these three latter chapters focus on a different part of the future: one on developing areas in pre-transplantation; one on developing areas in peri-transplantation, and one on developing areas in post-transplantation. In between these two structures of the past and the future lies the present. This middle section is structured into three parts: biology, practical application, and complications, one organ at a time.

The book is a masterpiece and serves as an authoritative background for any reading to be done in the area. This is the book that the reader who will buy only one book on bone marrow transplantation needs to buy. Whether the reader be a hematologist, oncologist, radiation oncologist, surgeon, physician's assistant, nurse, or other professional, this book will serve them well. At least until the third edition is published.

As with any book however, the rapidly changing nature of the field and the explosions of new developments may make it obsolete before the reader can make it to the end of this book. Even then, that would take many years and one can only hope that a third, and subsequently other editions, will be available by that time.

Certain readers may not find all that they need. The transplanter for the pediatric patient will find that although many chapters are done very well (e.g. there is a whole chapter on growth and development in children after BMT), others do not dig deep enough into pediatric ground. Thus, although there is sufficient coverage for bone marrow transplantation in neuroblastoma and in brain tumors, there is hardly any on Ewings Sarcoma in children, despite the importance of this disease, and the recent breakthrough in transplantation of this disease. Moreover, the pediatric practitioner will be disappointed by the lack of psychosocial findings in children undergoing bone marrow transplantation, or on family dynamics before, during, and after transplant, despite growing literature in this area. Finally, the reader who hopes to more thoroughly understand the plasticity of the stem in terms of its pluripotentiality to become cells of other organs, concepts that have brought the proposals of autologous stem cell transplantation feasible for organ injury.

Reviewed for Bloodline by:
Dr. Paulette Mehta
Professor, Hematology-Oncology, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
Chief, Hematology-Oncology, Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System
Little Rock, Arkansas.

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