WARSAW, May 27 (Xinhua) -- Every fifth Polish patient in need of bone marrow is unable to find a donor, non-profit advocacy group DKMS said Sunday in statement, urging more people to register as donors.
DKMS, founded in Germany in 1991, works to raise blood cancer awareness and donor registration for hematopoietic stem transplantation.
On the occasion on the upcoming World Blood Cancer Day, DKMS said that every fifth patient in Poland, who needs a transplantation of hematopoietic stem cells, cannot find a genetic donor.
Therefore, more people should register as bone marrow and stem donors in order to increase the chance of finding a "genetic twin".
According to DKMS data, one person gets leukemia or other type of hematopoietic system every hour in Poland, both children and adults. For some of them, bone marrow transplantation is the only possible way of cure.
Only 25 percent of patients, however, finds a suitable donor in the family. The chance to find a "genetic twin" in an unrelated individual is only one to 20,000, or even one to several million, in case of a rare genotype, according to DKMS.
The DKMS foundation has been operating in Poland since 2008. Since then, it has observed an increase in the base of donors from less than 35,000 people to over 1.3 million. However, the donor database is still too small.
According to Polish National Cancer Registry data, over the last 30 years, the number of new cases of hematopoietic and lymphatic cancers in Poland has more than doubled. Most cases of blood cancer are observed among people aged between 50 and 79.
The World Blood Cancer Day, an international festival, celebrated annually on May 28, was initiated in 2014 by the DKMS foundation.