Posted on 12/27/2005 7:01:04 PM PST by Born Conservative
(AP) Jennifer Duran knows a bit about how challenging life will be for the French woman who got a face transplant.
After a kidney transplant at age 13, Duran took "20-something pills a day" to keep her body from rejecting her new organ. The drugs' side effects included facial hair — "not a good thing when you're a 13-year-old girl" — and memory problems that linger to this day.
The worst was the warts on one leg and foot, so painful that as a college student she often couldn't walk.
But today Duran, 26, is the picture of hope to many transplant patients. Her first donated kidney was replaced by a second one in 2002, along with a promising experimental treatment. Now she doesn't take any of the anti-rejection drugs the French woman will likely take for life.
"For the first time in my life, I know what healthy is. I'd never known that before," said the Boston area librarian.
Duran is the shining example of a risky approach: Doctors killed off her entire immune system and gave her bone marrow from her organ donor before she got the new kidney. The bone marrow stem cells gave her a new immune system that doesn't try to reject her donated organ.
"I'm very excited. It's still fairly new, but if it continues to work as well as it has so far, I think this could benefit a lot of people," said Dr. David Sachs, an immunologist at Massachusetts General Hospital.
He's tried the experimental technique on four patients and been successful with three, including Duran. One of his successes is a grandmother in her 60s who's been living without anti-rejection drugs for seven years.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
Thanks so much BC.
Hmmmm....makes sense, but wouldn't it increase the risk to the patient who needs the transplant? They're not generally in good health as it is...
Ok...so the new immune system doesn't reject the new organ....so why doesn't it reject the rest of the body instead?! Afterall, the bone marrow is a match to the transplanted organ, but not to the body it went into!
The immune system basically resides in the bone marrow/blood. After wiping out the bone marrow, the bone marrow transplant is then done, and the person receives a new immune system (kind of like when you reformat your hard drive and reload the operating system).
It is extremely risky. However, so were many things when they were tried out e.g. the first heart bypass surgery was risky, but today is a common surgery. This might or might not pan out to be a viable addition to organ transplant; time will tell. Ideally, science will develop a way to clone an organ from one's own stem cells to replace a non-functional organ. That way, the transplanted organ would not be foreign to the recipient.
I wonder if this treatment would help someone with an autoimmune disease? Kill off the immune system that is killing you and get a new one.
Bone marrow transplants are extremely risky, and the article doesn't mention that. I knew a girl who had one to cure her leukemia. She lived through the procedure and was cured, but had a stroke which gave her a permanent case of aphasia. This produced an extreme speech disability which really changed her life, not for the better.
Mind you, almost anything is better than dying. But it's not a case of just popping over to the hospital for the afternoon and having a bone marrow transplant.
It's the immune system that determines rejection, not the organ or body itself. By wiping out the immune system, you wipe out the rejection response by the body (you also wipe out the protection your body has against bacteria, fungus, viruses, etc.).
Interesting point. I suppose it has potential...
ping
They are risky. People who get them are brought to the brink of death, literally. A simple yeast, virus or bacteria that a normal immune system can fend off becomes a potential killer to someone who had their immune system wiped out. In addition, their blood counts become dangerously low, leading to uncontrolled bleeding, life-threatening anemia, etc. Maybe someday the procedure will be perfected to the point that it is much less dangerous.
Thanks for this article, very interesting. I lost two close friends, sisters, to complications from kidney transplants. One got several cadaver transplants and eventually died, and the sister got her dad's kidney and lived into her 30's; she died of the cancer she likely got from all anti-rejection drugs. Anything that gives hope for a better long-term quality of life is fantastic.
Killing off one's bone marrow is one of the most traumatic imaginable experiences, comparable to having terrible chemo -- which is in fact what it is. Sounds awful to me.
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