A group of doctors has published the medical case of a man who was subjected to a liver transplant to save his life and who died less than a year later from cancer he contracted from his donor.
The unnamed patient, 41 years old and living in California, had chronic liver disease and received a transplant from a deceased donor in 2001, who was later found to be had lung cancer that had not been detected, pick up the Daily Mail.
The recipient died of the same lung cancer as his first donor a year laterdespite the fact that surgeons performed a second emergency transplant to try to rid him of the disease.
The doctors involved in the case wrote in their report: “It is evident that the tumor cells escaped the confines of the transplanted liver a week after the transplant and they gained access to the general circulation.
They added that the situation is “the first case in the literature of transmission of donor cancer” despite removing the original organ and subjecting the recipient to a second transplant.
This case is one of the few in the United States in which the cancer has been transferred between organ donors and recipients.
Doctors believe that small cancer cells, too small to be detected by scanners, They migrated from the donor’s lungs to his liver, which would explain why his organ was declared cancer-free and safe for transplant.
The patient originally needed a liver transplant because developed cirrhosis due to hepatitis B, a chronic liver disease that causes scar tissue to replace healthy tissue in the liver and decrease its function.
The donor was a 63-year-old man who had died of a stroke but had no history of cancer. Laboratory tests performed before the transplant revealed that there were no signs of cancer in the donor’s liver, lungs, or chest.
However, when the donor was autopsied the day after surgery, a tumor was discovered in his lungs. He was diagnosed posthumously metastatic lung adenocarcinoma: lung cancer that had spread to the chest area between the lungs.
The autopsy results led doctors to relist the patient for another liver, which received seven days later and recovered from surgery successfully.
For weeks after the second surgery, the patient continued well, but due to the donor’s cancer, he underwent a CT scan ten months after the transplant, which showed no signs of cancer in the chest, abdomen or pelvis.
However, six weeks after the scan, the recipient began to experience abdominal pain, vomiting and feeling of satiety. Blood tests, fluid analysis and body scans revealed metastatic lung adenocarcinoma, the same type of cancer her first donor had.
And the immunosuppressive drugs they gave the patient to prevent organ rejection likely fueled the cancer, allowing it to grow and spread more easily, making it even more deadly.
He was prescribed chemotherapy and was scheduled to start a few weeks later, but a month after the diagnosis, the man developed fluid buildup and a blood clot in his legs. He was admitted to the hospital for treatment, but He died 24 hours later.
Analysis of donor and recipient cancers “confirms that the first donor was the source of the malignancy”. The doctors wrote in the case report published in the journal Liver Transplantation that an analysis of tumor cells from both donors and the recipient “showed striking similarities to lung adenocarcinoma from donor 1.”
The recipient’s tumor cells had “identical” characteristics to donor 1’s lung tumor. Further testing revealed that the cancer “originated in donor 1, not in donor 2 or the recipient himself.”
Cases of “transplanted” cancer are extremely rare and there are no statistics on the matter: only a few have been documented sporadic cases in the medical literature.
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