The Pathophysiology of Acquired Aplastic Anemia

Plastic anemia, which is pancytopenia with a fatty or “empty” bone marrow, is remarkable for the simplicity of its pathologic picture and the direct derivation of its clinical manifestations.1 Although it is not a common disease, the drama of an individual case and the larger consequences of its associations give it considerable interest. That aplastic anemia is perhaps the most dreaded idiosyncratic complication of drug treatment has serious and often expensive consequences for drug development, for risk assessment, for approval by regulatory agencies, and in legal actions.Aplastic anemia, first described by Paul Ehrlich in 1888 from an autopsy of . . .