Patients
A total of 2739 patients with severe AA diagnosed according to current criteria1 were treated in Europe from 1991 and 2002 and reported to the SAA-WP Registry. Adequate information at the time of treatment was available for 2479 receiving either BMT (n=1567) or immunosuppression (n=912) as first line treatment and this cohort formed the basis for this study (Table 1). The median age of the patients at diagnosis was 23.5 years (range, 1–94 years) and 18.7 years (range, 1–67 years) for those treated with immunosuppression and BMT, respectively; 1479 patients were male and 1105 female, while in 5 cases gender was not specified.