Number of Actual Transplants By Race* in 2006

Race	Actual Transplants	Number with No Match	Percentage with No Match
European American (White)	2,394	203	9%
African American	120	72	38%
Asian American	83	22	21%
Hispanic	191	38	17%
Native American	12	1	8%
*The table was modified from NMDP data presented in Table 1 of "One Chance in a Million: Altruism and the Bone Marrow Registry" by Damien Sheehan-Conner et al. The NMDP did not designate mixed heritage as a separate race in the 2006 report used to create this table.

The reasons a high percentage of minorities were not able to find a donor is complicated. However, two seem to stick out. First, the number of minorities in the NMDP registry give rise to a lower likelihood of finding a match - i.e., there are over 5 million white Americans in the registry as compared to less than 1 million for any racial minority. Secondly, many of the people in the minority and, to a much lesser extent, white population are either knowingly or unknowingly of mixed heritage. This diversity of mixed heritage people, along with the lack of large and definable pools of individuals with matching HLA type, could, theoretically, make it far more difficult for mixed heritage people to find a match. Our intent is to design strategies that will allow us to pull out these people with factual demographic analysis, arrange them by subpopulations and reevaluate clinical outcomes.