What is organ transplantation?

Not all patients with organ transplants are successful, have cases of transplant rejection immediately or after several years, but also have life expectancy for several decades.

What is an organ transplant?

Organ transplants are moving organs from one person to another or from one position to another on the same human body, to replace lost or damaged organs. Internal organs and tissues transplanted internally are called autograft .

Transplants are performed on two individuals of the same species called allograft . This organ removal can be done on a living person or a dead person.

Transplantable parts are the heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, pancreas, intestine, and thymus gland. Transplanted tissues include bones, tendons, corneas, skin, heart valves, nerves and blood vessels. Around the world, the kidneys are the most commonly implanted organ, followed by the liver and the third is the heart. Corneal and skeletal muscles are the most common transplanted tissue; The number of transplants of these tissues is more than ten times higher than other tissue transplants.

Transplantable parts are the heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, pancreas, intestine, and thymus gland.

Organ donors may be living, brain dead, or die through circulatory death. Tissue can be recovered from organ donors who die from circulatory death, as well as brain death - up to 24 hours after cardiac arrest. Unlike organs, most tissues (with the exception of the cornea) can be preserved and stored for up to 5 years, meaning they can be "stored". Organ transplantation poses a number of bioethics issues, including the definition of death, when and how the transplanted organ is allowed to be transplanted, and the amount paid for transplants graft.

Other ethical issues include transplant tourism and the broader socio-economic context in which procurement of organs for transplants may occur. A special problem is organ trafficking . Some body parts, such as the brain, cannot be implanted.

Organ transplantation is one of the most difficult and complex areas of modern medicine. Some important areas in this are problems with graft rejection, in which the body has immune reactions to transplant organs, which can lead to transplant failure and need to remove surgery. Immediately remove transplanted organs.Graft rejection may be reduced by serotype to determine which recipient is most appropriate for the person and through the use of immunosuppressive drugs.

Classification of organ transplants

Autograft - autograft

Self-transplantation is tissue transplantation on the same person. Sometimes this is done with excess tissue, regenerative tissue, or tissue that is needed more than elsewhere (eg skin grafting, vascular extract for CABG, etc.). Sometimes a transplant process is performed to remove tissue and then treat the tissue or the patient before returning the tissue to its original location (eg, hematopoietic stem cell transplantation and storage). preoperative blood).

During a rotationplasty surgery, a movable joint is used to replace another more important joint; Usually a joint of the foot or ankle joint is used to replace a knee joint. The foot of the patient will be cut in half and reversed, the knee is removed, and the tibia will be paired with the femur.

Unknown things about organ transplantation

Growing new organs

The case of an 8-year-old British Angel Burton is extremely rare. She had severe kidney failure that doctors had to perform surgery. What astounded even the doctors was that when they saw Angel had four kidneys, two healthy new kidneys stacked on two damaged old kidneys, which worked independently of each other. Angel Burton's baby body "healed" itself. This is a double kidney phenomenon in medicine, it only occurs in 1% of the population.

4 kidneys of Angel Burton.

Mechanism of graft rejection

After organ transplantation, all patients often use life-saving anti-rejection drugs to maintain the life and operation of the transplant. Although organ donors and recipients have the most similar biological indexes, each body has a different immune system. There are patients after the immune system transplant does not accept new organs leading to organ damage, even leading to death.

Since the world's first organ transplant, scientists have been searching for ways to 'fool' the immune system, making the system accept a strange organ. As Dr. David Sachs of Boston, USA has done such tricks, he has injected stem cells into the bone marrow into recipients to create a new immune system for the patient, he hopes this way. Immunity will more easily accept "strange objects". However, not all cases were successful, and his patients had a kidney transplant failure and a second kidney transplant was required to treat the disease.

High risk of infection

One of the diseases that transplant recipients are at risk is diabetes. After organ transplantation, patients often have to take drugs that suppress the immune system for the rest of their lives, which is a risk for other body parts. When the normal immune system is weakened, patients are more susceptible to infection, especially common diseases such as colds, flu . For drugs that inhibit the immune system in the organ transplant industry can cause side effects, cause insomnia, neurosis, hirsutism, edema, hypertension, or cause diabetes . In these cases, discontinue use of the drug is impossible.

Organ trafficking

It is estimated that organ trafficking is worth billions of dollars each year.

As soon as the organ transplant industry was born, there was a need for organ resources. It is estimated that organ trade, mostly illegal, is worth billions of dollars each year. Journalist Scott Carney studied and wrote a book on the black market, which trades human body parts. In his research, he revealed that after a historic tsunami in 2004, a village in India called Kidneyvakkam, also known as a kidney donor village, appeared. Here the victims of the tsunami because of existence had to sell their kidneys. Many people here have scarring in the abdomen, a trace of a kidney surgery. Carney, the journalist, questioned the source of organs from poor people selling kidneys to serve the rich as the most unethical, unethical market.

Entangled with religion

Religion has been a major obstacle to organ transplant science, since different religions have different beliefs and beliefs for those who have died. For many religions is the insult of the dead of the dead, those who agree to donate their loved ones feel guilty to the dead and ancestors. Buddhism has a notion of death .

In Iran most organ transplants are taken from survivors by Muslims who conceive of not insulting the dead. While Catholics or Catholics readily accept organ harvesting and transplantation, Jews have a completely different concept. For them, a human being is still considered to be alive when the heart is beating, even if the person is brain dead. Jews believe that death really happens only when the human heart stops beating. So if in the case of a heart transplant, the donor's heart will beat in the recipient's chest, this action is unacceptable. It committed moral problems.

The field always requires research

So far each year the world has recorded about 40,000 organ transplants.

Organ transplants are a new field, always demanding in-depth studies of human biomedical and human. The first organ transplant was performed in 1954, which was a case of kidney transplantation. Soon after transplanting, the patient died. It was not until 30 years later, with the introduction of anti-rejection medication, that the treatment became a revolution in medicine. Its success has been awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine. To have today, it requires many surgeries, scientific and medical research projects on humans. So far each year the world has recorded about 40,000 organ transplants.

Do organ transplant recipients live?

There has been no statistical study on the life expectancy of patients who have performed organ transplants. But it can be affirmed that with the development of science and technology, live organ transplant patients for another 10-20 years are not too rare, they are being supported to live more and more.

In liver transplant patients, if successful, living after 5 years of transplantation is becoming popular in the world. For kidneys, scientists believe that living kidney transplants increase patients' lifespan. Heart transplant patients seem to live the least life compared to other organs such as kidneys, liver .

With the development of organ transplant science, scientists believe that in the near future, the average life expectancy of patients after transplantation will not be inferior to the average person.

Hope to source organs from 3D printers

The emergence of 3-D printers is becoming a new revolution in medicine. One can create any 3-D object with just one printer, including parts of the body. There have been many successful transplants thanks to 3-D printers such as replacement of ear, cartilage, bladder, and uterus models. Now scientists are still studying with the hope of producing a Real internal organs like biological kidneys from 3-D printers. They expect to take another 15-20 years to produce the world's first biological kidney.