Apheresis days required for harvesting CD34+ cells predicts hematopoietic recovery and survival following autologous transplantation.

We sought to determine whether patients requiring more aphereses to obtain adequate numbers of CD34+ cells had delayed hematopoietic recovery following autologous transplantation. We identified 496 consecutive individuals with lymphoma who underwent hematopoietic stem cell mobilization using etoposide and G-CSF and first autologous transplantation. In multivariate analysis, increased apheresis days as a continuous and as a categorical variable at 5/<5 days significantly predicted neutrophil recovery. Apheresis days fell just short of significance (P=0.06) as a predictor of platelet recovery in multivariate analysis. Increased apheresis days (as both continuous and categorical variables) were also predictive of treatment-related myelodysplastic syndrome/AML. Patients who underwent 5 days of pheresis had significantly worse survival (P=0.001) than patients with less pheresis days owing to significantly higher relapse mortality (P=0.001). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]