Acute rejection — is the most common kind and develops over a short period of time, a few days or weeks. The risk is highest during the first 2 to 3 months, but can also happen a year or more after transplant. Chronic rejection — is a process that occurs slowly and over a long period of time.
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality after kidney transplantation. Death from cardiovascular disease is also the most common cause of graft loss.
Possible Complications
Infections (because the person's immune system is suppressed by taking immune-suppressing medicines) Loss of function in the transplanted organ/tissue. Side effects of medicines, which may be severe.
Infection. Minor infections, such as urinary tract infections (UTIs), colds and flu, are common after kidney transplants. You can also get more serious infections, such as pneumonia and cytomegalovirus (CMV), which may require hospital treatment.
Possible problems after a transplant
First, many people having a transplant have health problems in addition to kidney failure. These can include diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, or other complications of being on dialysis.
In the US, the three leading causes of death after transplantation are cardiovascular disease, malignancy, and infections. Cosio et al. reported that while cardiovascular mortality is higher in diabetics post-transplantation, cancer is the most common cause of death in non-diabetics (Figure 1A).
Immediate, surgery-related risks of organ donation include pain, infection, hernia, bleeding, blood clots, wound complications and, in rare cases, death. Long-term follow-up information on living-organ donors is limited, and studies are ongoing.
Hyperacute rejection is usually caused by specific antibodies against the graft and occurs within minutes or hours after grafting. Acute rejection occurs days or weeks after transplantation and can be caused by specific lymphocytes in the recipient that recognize human leukocyte antigens in the tissue or organ grafted.
In heart transplants, the rate of organ rejection and patient mortality are the highest, even though the transplants are monitored by regular biopsies. Specifically, some 40% of heart recipients experience some type of severe rejection within one year of their transplant.
More than 91 percent live at least five years. At 10 years, 71 percent are alive. For other transplant types, survival rates are somewhat lower. Five-year survival rates are 76 percent, 73 percent, and 56 percent for heart, liver, and lung recipients, respectively, according to UNOS.
While transplanted organs can last the rest of your life, many don't. Some of the reasons may be beyond your control: low-grade inflammation from the transplant could wear on the organ, or a persisting disease or condition could do to the new organ what it did to the previous one.
In the United States, invasive candidiasis is most common, followed by aspergillosis and cryptococcosis, but other types of fungal infections are also possible. For lung transplant patients, aspergillosis is most common.
Very common longer-term risks
Infections are very common, even many months or years after a kidney transplant. The most common infections are chest or urine infections. These are usually fairly straightforward to treat with antibiotic tablets. The most common of these is a virus called CMV (cytomegalovirus).
The brain is the only organ in the human body that cannot be transplanted. The brain cannot be transplanted because the brain's nerve tissue does not heal after transplantation.
Summary: One third of organ transplants are lost to transplant rejection. Although acute transplant rejection responds relatively well to steroids, chronic rejection (which is mainly mediated by antibodies) has no effective treatment.
Only ovaries CANNOT be transplanted in among options. It was not medically possible for one woman to donate her ovaries to another until 2008. In 2008 scientists claimed that the first baby born from a transplanted ovary, The transplant was carried out by Dr.
Graft rejection occurs when the recipient's immune system attacks the donated graft and begins destroying the transplanted tissue or organ. The immune response is usually triggered by the presence of the donor's own unique set of HLA proteins, which the recipient's immune system will identify as foreign.
Acute rejection happens when your body's immune system treats the new organ like a foreign object and attacks it. We treat this by reducing your immune system's response with medication. Chronic rejection can become a long-term problem. Complex conditions can make rejection difficult to treat.
It is common - about 15% of people experience acute rejection in the first three months after a transplant. If acute rejection has not occurred within one year of the operation, then it is unlikely to happen, so long as the anti-rejection drugs are taken regularly.
There are three major types of allograft rejection: Hyperacute, acute, and chronic rejection.