Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) is one of the advanced therapeutic modalities instituted for malignant/nonmalignant life-threatening and/or life-limiting disorders in children. Increasing access to the therapy during recent time reflects in raising footfall of these patients to pediatric intensive care unit for managing pre- or post-transplant complications. For the intensivist, HSCT recipients represent a distinct population with unique pathophysiological and therapeutic challenges related to cell therapy, type of HSCT product, time-dependent complications, conditioning therapy used, pre-transplant medication, and chemotherapy exposure. Most of these patients are heavily pre-treated; most decisions in these circumstances are high-stake multidisciplinary decision-making, especially when acute care needs arise. In this review article, we discuss about the basic types of HSCT, source of stem cell, indications for the therapy, the procedure of stem cell collection, storage, conditioning therapy, graft-versus-host disease prophylaxis, and other common medications used in HSCT. Understanding these basic care domains of HSCT is intended to enable the intensivists to function as an efficient multidisciplinary team member to facilitate appropriate acute care needs.
Kandasamy et al. (Thu,) studied this question.