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).
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