title: The EBMT risk score.
abstract: The European Group for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (EBMT) risk score provides a simple tool to assess instantly chances and risks of hematopoietic SCT(HSCT) for an individual patient pre-transplant. Five factors, age of the patient, stage of the disease, time from diagnosis, donor type and donor recipient gender combination augment risk for an individual patient with increasing score from 0 as best to 7 as worst in an additive way. The score holds for all acquired hematological disorders, for allogeneic and autologous HSCT (score 0-5), is independent of the HSCT technology and is valid for standard or reduced intensity conditioning. Survival is uniformly worse for older patients, transplanted in advanced disease stage after a long-time interval and with a mismatched donor than for younger patients, transplanted soon in early stage with a well matched donor. Additional risk factors such as performance score, CMV serostatus or cytokine polymorphisms improve prediction but to different extents for low or high-risk patients. Comparative assessment of disease risk and global pre-transplant risk should guide decisions for each patient with his/her specific disease between HSCT and a non-transplant approach and replace the traditional 'donor vs no donor' with such a risk-adapted individualized strategy.
authors.affiliation: Hematology, University Hospital, Basel, Switzerland. alois.gratwohl@unibas.ch
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gratwohl
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D005260:Female; D018380:Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation; D006801:Humans; D019520:Living Donors; D008297:Male; D020379:Risk Adjustment; D012737:Sex Factors; D014182:Transplantation, Autologous; D014184:Transplantation, Homologous