- Joined
- Sep 21, 2006
- Messages
- 7,863
- Reaction score
- 7
- Points
- 4,616
- Location
- The bottom of a pile of debt.
- Pharmacist
Transplant without immunosuppresants
- Thread starter Farmercyst
- Start date
For sure interesting...we deal with so many issues with transplant drugs. This would only be possible with certain organs and with a living donor.
- Joined
- Jul 5, 2010
- Messages
- 2,645
- Reaction score
- 524
- Points
- 5,366
- Pharmacist
The earliest successful kidney transplants were between identical twins; the longest-lived one died last year at the age of 76, 55 years after her transplant. Her death, BTW, was not from kidney disease, but from complications of Alzheimer's. 🙁 Her name was Edith Helm, and her donor and identical twin Wanda Foster continues to live in excellent health.
Helm also threw the transplant program into a tailspin 2 years after her transplant by becoming the first transplantee to get pregnant. The doctors all urged her to have an abortion, and when she said no way to that, they wanted her to spend her entire pregnancy in the hospital. It was quickly apparent that this wasn't necessary either (she didn't even have morning sickness) so she went home. She was persuaded to have a c-section and was willing to do that........and the doctors all said in retrospect that this probably wasn't necessary either. She later had 2 more children; the last was stillborn for reasons totally unrelated to her health history.
I also know of a case where a woman who had undergone a liver transplant stopped taking her meds as a suicidal gesture, because the drugs made her have erratic mood swings and her husband left her and took their child with him because he feared for their safety. She never experienced any rejection episodes to my knowledge. Other people have stopped their meds for any number of reasons and not had rejection, and it's believed that stem cells in the transplanted organ engrafted and the recipient's immune system did not recognize the organ as foreign tissue.
Helm also threw the transplant program into a tailspin 2 years after her transplant by becoming the first transplantee to get pregnant. The doctors all urged her to have an abortion, and when she said no way to that, they wanted her to spend her entire pregnancy in the hospital. It was quickly apparent that this wasn't necessary either (she didn't even have morning sickness) so she went home. She was persuaded to have a c-section and was willing to do that........and the doctors all said in retrospect that this probably wasn't necessary either. She later had 2 more children; the last was stillborn for reasons totally unrelated to her health history.
I also know of a case where a woman who had undergone a liver transplant stopped taking her meds as a suicidal gesture, because the drugs made her have erratic mood swings and her husband left her and took their child with him because he feared for their safety. She never experienced any rejection episodes to my knowledge. Other people have stopped their meds for any number of reasons and not had rejection, and it's believed that stem cells in the transplanted organ engrafted and the recipient's immune system did not recognize the organ as foreign tissue.
