Organ Donor Passes Cancer To 4 People

[RAMROD 118,232]

It's well known that organ transplants can pass infectious diseases from donors to recipients in rare cases. But even more rarely, transplants can transmit cancer, as a new case shows.

In what's being described as an "extraordinary case," four people in Europe developed breast cancer after they received organs from the same donor, according to a new report.

Three of the patients died from the cancer, which underscores the "often-fatal consequences of donor-derived breast cancer," the authors wrote in their report, published in the July issue of the American Journal of Transplantation.

The 53-year-old organ donor died from a stroke in 2007, according to the report, written by researchers in the Netherlands and Germany. She had no known medical conditions that would have precluded organ donation, and multiple tests showed no signs of cancer. Doctors transplanted her kidneys, lungs, liver and heart into the donor recipients. (The heart-transplant patient died of unrelated causes shortly after the transplant.)

But 16 months later, a woman who received the lung transplant became ill and was found to have cancer in the lymph nodes in her chest. An analysis of the cancer cells revealed that they were actually breast cancer cells, and DNA in the cancer cells showed that these cells had come from the organ donor. The lung recipient's cancer spread, and she died about a year after her cancer diagnosis, the report said.

 

full report at source: https://www.livescience.com/63596-organ-donation-transmitted-breast-cancer.html?ftag=CNM-00-10aac3a

 

that's scary but also sad at the same time

[Miel 15,009]

I guess what freaks me out the most is that there was no sign of cancer from the donor. Did it just miss any sort of detection?

[Amidana 4,333]

What?!?!? How?!?! Guess those cells REALLY didn't like those organs 

[Twitter 14]

Sending my love and prayers to their families.

[roy 1,216]

Incredibly unfortunate and I hope the families get better, big uwu.

[Morphine Prince 110,088]

Absolutely devastating for those people and their families. 

It’s also sad that many people who are already scared or don’t want to donate their organs will look at this and say “See!” and use it as an excuse. 

Become an organ donor, please. This is a RARE case. Organ donors save lives. 

[Economy 53,216]

8 hours ago, Miel said:

I guess what freaks me out the most is that there was no sign of cancer from the donor. Did it just miss any sort of detection?

Cancer is a weird thing. Some types of aggressive malignant cancers spread and multiply extremely quickly. You may not see a visible mass yet the cells are already spreading around

 

Other types of cancers stay contained in one spot potentially for years before spreading

 

My uncle had a kidney removed cause it had cancer. That was maybe 3 or 4 years ago. So far no signs of it coming  back anywhere else in the body

 

On a side note. Scientists are studying cancer cells to fight aging. Regular cells can only divide so many times in ones lifetime then the tellomers get too short and the cells no longer divide (and they become less and less efficient as early as 30 years old or before). But cancer cells do not have a limit. Their tellomers get really short but stop shrinking after that point and can keep dividing indefinitely

[Miel 15,009]

@Economy thanks for the clarification!

I was curious whether or not telomerization affected organ donation viability.