Unprecedented medical case: 4 people get cancer after receiving transplants from the same person

Improving detailed screening of organ donors will limit the rate of cancer transmission and similar medical tragedies.

A rare medical case has just been reported in the American Journal of Transplantation. In it, 4 patients in turn had cancer after receiving transplants from the same donor.

The donor is a 57-year-old woman who died of a stroke. But extremely careful screening tests do not detect the presence of cancer in her body. As a result, the woman's lungs, liver, heart and 2 kidneys were given away to save the lives of five other patients, but inadvertently, they brought death to at least three patients.

Researchers describe this as an unprecedented special case. In principle, all patients with melanoma will not be able to donate organs. But this still occurs at a rate of 0.01-0.05%, meaning from 1-5 people with cancer in every 10,000 organ transplants, because the cancer of the donor is not detected.

An unprecedented medical case recorded 4 patients who had cancer after receiving transplants from the same person.

The study was led by specialist Frederike J. Bemelman at the Center for Academic Medicine in Amsterdam:

"Many previous reports have shown that cancer infection may occur during solid organ transplants. However, this is the first report describing breast cancer transmission after multi-organ transplantation. from one donor to four recipients ".

In this case, the donor was a 53-year-old woman who died of a stroke in 2007. Before her death, she underwent comprehensive medical examination procedures, including X-rays and super scans. negative and other tests. Even so, doctors do not detect any signs of malignant tumors.

Soon after her death, her organs were transplanted to five other patients waiting. Five months later, the first patient - who received the heart - died of sepsis, a cause not associated with cancer.

In the following months, the remaining patients began to have many abnormal manifestations. In August 2008, at the 10th month after the transplant, the woman who received 2 lungs had many dysfunction.

Tests show the appearance of cancer in epithelial cells. After that, the cancer spreads to many other places in the body. This woman died in 2009, because breast cancer originated from donors.

After her death, the doctor immediately examined the person who received the left kidney, a 62-year-old woman. Initial tests did not show that she had cancer and did not need to remove the receiving organ.

However, the truth is that the cancer cell has quietly spread. After 5 years, tests revealed that they had spread to her kidneys, liver, bones and other places in her body. Two months later - exactly six years after the transplant was successful - the woman who received the left kidney died.

An organ donor can save 8 other lives, but in rare cases, the opposite can happen.

The same story happened with a 59-year-old woman who received a donated liver. After four years from the transplant, she discovered a tumor of the same origin as the previous two patients. The woman has been treated for cancer and survived for 3 years.

So after a liver transplant, she only lived for 7 years.

Of the four recipients, one of the luckiest people survived after cancer. It was a middle-aged man, 32 years old, who had a kidney transplant on his right, and later found carcinoma in 2011.

The difference is that soon after, this man decided to cut off this kidney. And cancer therapies have succeeded in inhibiting the disease for him until now.

"Since August 2012, complete remission has been documented [on this 32-year-old patient]," the authors write. "The last re-test in April 2017, the patient still has no signs of the tumor and he wants to recombine a new kidney again."

Until now, no one knew how cancer had spread in every patient. But the researchers hypothesize - that fish immunosuppressants (weakening the immune system so that transplanted organs are not eliminated) have prevented cancer cells from spreading widely.

Statistics show that donor screening measures can limit the rate of cancer transmission to 0.01-0.05%. But the truth, this unfortunate thing still happens once in every 2,000-10,000 transplants.

Therefore, the study authors emphasize in the report that further screening of organ donors will limit the rate of cancer transmission and similar medical tragedies . Also, if it unfortunately happens again, early detection, removal of transplanted organs and treatment for cancer management are necessary and still provide a high chance of survival for the recipient.