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Fort Bliss soldier leads bone marrow registration drive [1]
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Date: 2024-11-07
Army Spc. Christian Sutton remembers his family telling him that his mother needed one good match.
His mother had Hodgkin lymphoma, a blood cancer that attacks the lymphatic system. She had already received one blood transplant, but it wasn’t enough. Sutton was 4 years old when his mother died before she could find a better donor match.
Two decades later, Sutton is spearheading a project to prevent other families from experiencing the same. What started as a hobby at Fort Bliss for the 24-year-old Army soldier has turned into an effort to make donor registration drives a permanent fixture in the military.
“She died because she couldn’t find a good match,” Sutton said of his mother. “What I’m hoping to do is to get the military on board as a whole with this entire untapped, healthy, young, diverse population, and we’ll be able to make that less of a reality. … I want to make sure people don’t have to go through what my family went through.”
How do bone marrow donors help cancer patients?
Bone marrow donors are important because they help patients with blood cancers or malignancies recover after treatment, said Dr. Nanda K. Gopalan of Texas Oncology in El Paso.
When patients receive treatments such as high-dose chemotherapy, the patient will have difficulty producing red and blood white cells, as well as platelets. While some patients can receive a bone marrow transplant using their own stem cells, others need cells from donors, Gopalan said.
Fort Bliss soldiers fill out paperwork to register for the U.S. Department of Defense bone marrow donor program on August 8, 2022. (Courtesy of Spc Christian Sutton/U.S. Army)
For a blood transplant, the donor’s blood must have certain genetic markers that match those of the patient’s blood. A patient’s sibling has a greater chance of being a match than a parent or child, but 70% of patients do not have a fully matched donor in their family, according to the National Marrow Donor Program. Another reason why family members may not be able to donate is if they have the same inherited blood disorder as the patient, Gopalan said.
El Paso blood cancer patients have an additional challenge because minority groups are underrepresented in the donor registry, Gopalan continued. Most of the patients Texas Oncology sees in El Paso are Hispanic, so if they don’t have a family match, it can be more difficult for them to match with a donor from the registry, he said.
Army Spc. Christian Sutton started bone marrow registration drives in 2022 while stationed at Fort Bliss, El Paso. (Courtesy of U.S. Army)
Sutton started registering potential donors in 2022 while stationed at Fort Bliss. He got the idea after attending a punk show in El Paso and seeing a registration table set up at the venue. Sutton reached out to Salute to Life, the bone marrow donor center for the U.S. Department of Defense, and began in his free time convincing different units around base to let him host donor registration dives with them.
At the time it was mostly a solo campaign and he was hitting about one to two units a week. To begin the registration process, potential donors do a 10-second cheek swab to collect cells, which are mailed to the registry for analysis.
Part of his work is clearing up misconceptions, Sutton said. When he asks soldiers how they think bone marrow stem cells are taken out, he’ll usually hear everything but the correct answer, he said.
“They think it’s a spinal tap,” Sutton said. “They think it’s incredibly painful, that they crack your bones open and suck the juice out. But the biggest way you donate bone marrow cells is through drawing blood.”
It’s not a huge commitment because people have to be an exact or near-exact match to a patient, so chances are low someone on the registry will be called to donate bone marrow, Sutton said.
But if someone is called, they might be the only known person who can save someone’s life, he said. A few people Sutton has registered in the past couple years have already been alerted as matches.
Sutton explains to units that it’s better to get on the registry early to safeguard their family. If they have a baby with a medical condition – sickle cell disease, compromised immune system, cancer – and need a match, it’s faster for a doctor to check the database to see who in the family is a match rather than beginning individual testing, which can take months, he said.
El Paso cancer patients seek transplants out of town
Each year, El Paso has an average of more than 130 patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and more than 100 with leukemia, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Bone marrow transplants can increase the chances of survival for patients with these cancers, as well as sickle cell disease and aplastic anemia, Gopalan said. The outlook has improved compared to in the past because the donor registry has expanded significantly over the last 20 years, he added.
Access to care is a challenge since many patients must travel outside of El Paso to receive a transplant, though Texas Oncology can connect patients to its statewide network of physicians, Gopalan said. After a transplant, patients have to stay in the hospital for four weeks, then close enough to their transplant care team for a few months until they are well enough to return to El Paso.
Fort Bliss soldiers swab their cheeks and fill out paperwork to register for the U.S. Department of Defense bone marrow donor program on April 28, 2022. (Courtesy of Spc Christian Sutton/U.S. Army)
In the future, blood cancer patients may be able to receive a bone marrow transplant at El Paso’s new comprehensive cancer center, a joint project between University Medical Center of El Paso and Texas Tech Health El Paso.
Texas Tech Health El Paso is in the early stages of planning specific services, but bone marrow transplants and related procedures will likely be a consideration, said spokesperson Patrick Espinoza.
The cancer center is slated for completion in fall 2026 and will staff a variety of specialists, including hematologist-oncologists, to provide care for patients with blood cancers, Espinoza said.
Matches living in El Paso can donate in El Paso, where their blood will be collected, frozen and shipped to where the patient is receiving treatment, Gopalan said.
If the patient matches with a family member, it can take as short as a week to arrange the transplant, Gopalan said. If they have to look on the registry, doctors will start locally, then regionally, then nationally, then internationally.
Turning volunteer campaign to Army-wide responsibility
By his own count, Sutton has signed 14,760 people for the Department of Defense’s bone marrow donor program since 2022. To put that in perspective, Sutton said: The U.S. Army registered about 800 people a year prior to his campaign. This year alone his team has registered about 8,000 people, he said.
Using Reddit, Sutton shared documentation of his efforts and connected to other Army bases to swap advice about holding registration drives for bone marrow donors.
Fort Bliss soldiers fill out paperwork to register for the U.S. Department of Defense bone marrow donor program on March 22, 2022. (Courtesy of Spc Christian Sutton/U.S. Army)
While the campaign, named Operation Ring the Bell, is still in the grassroots stage, Sutton said he has received support from the commanding general at Fort Bliss and leaders in the Army to integrate registrations in the Army’s system. This ensures the operation can continue with or without him, Sutton said.
El Paso Matters received a copy of Sutton’s guidebook on how to streamline the program for the Army and turn the Army into the largest contributor to the national donor database. Ideally, every year, each unit would have someone briefed to coordinate a donor registration event for their unit, he said.
“With the drives I realized I was just putting a Band-Aid on the issue,” Sutton said. “The minute I stopped, the program would die down again for 10 years. I wanted more sustainability, so I took what I learned to figure out how to make this so Fort Bliss does this permanently.”
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[1] Url:
https://elpasomatters.org/2024/11/07/el-paso-army-bone-marrow-registry/
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