California man dies after catching CANCER from someone else in extraordinarily rare case

A man who underwent a liver transplant to save his life died less than a year later from cancer he contracted from his donor.

The unnamed patient, 41, from California, had chronic liver disease and received a transplant in 2001 from a deceased donor, who was later found to have lung cancer that had gone undetected.

The recipient died a year later from the same lung cancer as his first donor, despite surgeons giving him a second emergency transplant in an attempt to rid him of the disease.

Doctors involved in the case wrote in their report: ‘It is clear that within a week of transplantation, the tumor cells had escaped the borders of the transplanted liver and gained access to the general circulation.’

They added that the situation is the “first case in the literature of cancer transmission through donors,” despite the recipient removing the original organ and undergoing a second transplant.

And this case is one of the few in the US where cancer has been transmitted between organ donors and recipients.

Doctors believe that small cancer cells too small to be detected by scans have migrated from the donor’s lungs to his liver, which would explain why his organ was declared cancer-free and safe for transplant.

The patient originally needed a liver transplant because he developed hepatitis B cirrhosis – a chronic liver disease that causes scar tissue to replace healthy tissue in the liver and reduce its function.

The donor was a 63-year-old man who had died of a stroke but had no history of cancer. Laboratory tests performed prior to the transplant showed that there were no signs of cancer in the donor’s liver, lungs and chest.

However, when an autopsy was performed on the donor the day after the operation, a tumor was discovered in his lungs.

He was posthumously diagnosed with lung adenocarcinoma: lung cancer that had spread to the area of ​​his chest between the lungs.

The autopsy findings prompted doctors to re-register the patient for a new liver, which he received seven days later.

He recovered successfully from the operation.

The patient remained well for weeks after the second surgery, but because of the donor’s cancer, he underwent a CT scan 10 months after the transplant, which showed no signs of cancer in his chest, abdomen or pelvis.

However, six weeks after the scan, the recipient experienced abdominal pain, vomiting and a feeling of fullness.

Blood tests, fluid analysis and body scans revealed metastatic lung adenocarcinoma – the same type of cancer as his first donor.

And the immunosuppressive drugs the patient was given to prevent organ rejection likely fueled the cancer, making it easier to grow and spread, making it even more deadly.

Chemotherapy was prescribed and was supposed to start a few weeks later, but a month after his diagnosis, the man developed fluid retention and a blood clot in his legs.

He was admitted to hospital for treatment but died within 24 hours.

Sample B shows tumor cells in the donor’s right lung and square C shows features in the recipient’s tumor cells, which ‘have characteristics similar to donor tumor cells’

Analysis of the donor and recipient’s cancers “confirms that the first donor was the source of the malignancy.”

Doctors wrote in the case report published in the journal Liver Transplantation that an analysis of the tumor cells from both donors and the recipient showed “striking similarities to the lung adenocarcinoma of donor 1.”

The recipient’s tumor cells had ‘identical’ characteristics as the lung tumor of donor 1.

Further investigation revealed that the cancer ‘came from donor 1, not from donor 2 or the recipient himself.’

Cases of ‘transplanted’ cancer are extremely rare and there are no statistics on this subject; only a handful of sporadic cases have been documented in the medical literature.

A 2013 judgement of these cases, published in the Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine, states that there is no estimate of the risk of transmitting cancer from donor to recipient and limited data are available on this topic.

The report’s authors wrote: ‘The incidence of cancer transmission is so low that sporadic case reports are the main source of information.’

One earlier judgement a 1993 study, which looked at data from the 1970s, also found that there were only ‘sporadic’ reports of cancer transmitted through organ donation.

The 2013 review added: ‘The low frequency and highly variable stage of cancer make definitive risk calculations impossible.’

However, the authors went on to say that the data “very likely underestimates the true incidence.”

Using the limited data available, the authors of the 2013 report found that cancers known to have been transmitted from donor to recipient on at least one occasion included breast cancer, colon cancer, liver cancer, lung cancer, melanoma, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer and kidney cancer are. cancer.