Posted on 09/17/2018 7:26:25 AM PDT by BenLurkin
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
Passing cancer through an organ transplant is "a very, very uncommon event," said Dr. Lewis Teperman, director of organ transplantation at Northwell Health in New Hyde Park, New York, who was not involved in the case.
Indeed, transplant recipients have a chance of between 1 in 10,000 and 5 in 10,000 of this happening, according to the report.
"The organ supply is incredibly safe," Teperman told Live Science. That's because organ donors undergo rigorous screening, including family history for disease, such as cancer, and multiple laboratory tests. In this case, the 53-year-old donor underwent a physical exam as well as an ultrasound of the abdomen and heart, a chest X-ray, and an examination of the airways.
Still, even with these robust procedures in place, "it's impossible to screen everything," and there's a very small chance that a donor will have an undetected disease that could be transmitted, Teperman said.
In the current case, the patient had an undetected breast cancer. The donor may have had "micro metastases" or groups of cancer cells that spread from the original cancer site but are too small to be detected with screening or imaging tests, the report said.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
well-formedness criteria for any action include a benefit to risk ratio and a benefit to cost ratio.
If you need an organ transplant, you don’t usually have great odds to begin with.
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