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Woman Develops Peanut Allergy After Lung Transplant
An anonymous reader writes "A woman in need of a lung transplant got her new lungs from someone with a peanut allergy who died of anaphylactic shock. Seven months after the surgery, the woman was at an organ transplant support group when she ate a peanut butter cookie and had a violent allergic reaction. So how had the woman's new lungs brought along a peanut allergy? A blog post dives into the medical details and explains that immune cells in the donated lungs couldn't have lived in the new body for long enough to cause the reaction... however, if they encountered an allergen (i.e. something peanuty) shortly after being transplanted, they could have trained the woman's native immune cells to respond."
Where do you find these pictures? Did somebody get paid to go buy a container of peanuts and make that? Idle indeed...
SIG: HUP
You should see what happened to my pony, mister.
I wouldn't call this an "idle" article. It's more of a real article that some of them lately.
Developing an allergy like that has got to be pretty annoying, but if I had to choose, I'd still prefer new lungs and an allergy over no allergy but no lungs either.
I believe if you get a lung transplant you get to take immunosuppresive drugs for life. So, she's on a heavy diet of drugs that deeply mess with her immune system, her immune system malfunctions, therefore it must be some mystical connection to a dead person.
If you hear hooves, think horse not zebra.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Sue the donor's estate
,...Mr. Peanut! He cracks me up, with that hat and can and the best part - the monocle! Perhaps he somehow is related to this fascinating story.
Peanus rock. She shoulda taken the shortened lifespan and enjoyed her peanut butter filed final moments. Seriously though, crazy story
Sigh. Great, now the pea-nutty people have more ammo for declaring nut-free zones (from which they do not remove themselves, ironically) in schools, camps, clubs, etc etc.
Meanwhile, in the real world.... Around a hundred people die from all food allergies combined in the US each year. Yet thousands of parents and related busybodies haul children off to alergists, and when they're told a "detectable response" exists, they start shrieking about anaphalactic shock and the deadly threat of peanuts, and buy another box of Epi-Pens.
Nonsense. Complete, utter illogical reality-distorting nonsense. The pea-nutty holocaust has no basis in science. The *only* semi-scientific numbers indicating a spike in peanut allergy incidence was a commercial report sponsored by an Epi-Pen manufacturer several years ago with dubious data sources.
According to the CDC (which employs actual scientists, I'm told), the deadly threat from peanut allergies affects about 1 in 30 Million people. Deadly allergic reactions to fish and fish oils are more than TWICE as prevalent as peanut allergies. Yet fish sticks are served in school cafeterias, hippie daycare providers happily much on boxed sushi with bare hands, and gramma still makes tuna sandwiches... without an epidemic of people dropping dead.
I'm sad that this gets press, not because single real events aren't tragic. I'm sad because my kids have to suffer thru more of the secondary effects: an ongoing flood of hysterical peanut hypochondria.
I think not...(*poof*)
I read the title as "Woman Develops Penis Allergy After Lung Transplant".
where's doctor House when you need him?
I've done research into this because I suffer from several allergies to common foods, and more than one is life threatening. I want to donate blood, but I fear that I will pass them on. No use in saving someone only to kill them with what is coming from the hospital cafeteria... Though it would take repeated exposures for the allergy to be significant enough to become life threatening.
Well, its not just allergies, but all kinds of things including neurological issues like nervous ticks are transmittable well.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
This reminds me of an article I read in the New Scientist on the correlation of pollen types and food allergies. The prime example was a line running east west in northern Europe. On one side of the line you have birch trees, and on the same side of the line a much higher instance of allergic reactions to apple skins. It turns out that there is a protein in apple skins that is the same as that found in birch pollen.
That noise you just heard was my mind a'sploding.
"This would have made an excellent episode of house."
Um, the concept that she should not have experienced a reaction since her immune system was not sensitive to peanuts beforehand is flawed.
I enjoy chronic mild asthma, and the cause is my bronchial tubes' reaction to exercise and various allergens. If my lungs were transplanted to someone, I would expect that they would also have asthma, since it is my bronchi that are reacting.
This case is an example of a not very well thought out transplant process. Implanting the lungs of a anaphylactic shock victim into someone doesn't ensure at all that the recipient will not also be subsceptible to shock. It guarantees it.
Wow. what a great mistake. We learned something here that we should have already known.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Well, it sounds like an allergy transplant to me. The lungs were just a bonus. I wonder if we can give Jobs a helping of anti-megalomaniac with his next liver...
For example, you get a bone marrow transplant and your blood type will change to that of the donor. Maybe they should start transplanting those rare blood-types to blood bank volunteers. I know a few homeless guys that would love to get a higher premium for their donation.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
Asthma may work slightly differently than allergies, but I believe the root cause of both is the immune system triggering an excessive response. Your immune system is separate from your lungs so your asthma would not necessarily be transmitted to a donor. Some of your immune system's B-Cells and T-cells would transfer over though, and as this case demonstrates it is possible for them to cause some changes to a host immune system. It's rather uncommon and should only happen in unusual circumstances.
The article actually explained all this pretty well.
"(i.e. something peanuty)" - Whoa, whoa! Slow down the technical medical jargon!
When they're trained, they become terrorist cells.
What I'm wondering is what the hell this WOMAN was doing at a convention. Did her husband give her permission? And she better be 5 pounds underweight for her height if she's indulging on fatty snacks.
Women these days are disgusting compared to how they were in 'Mad Men' days.
Seven months is short?
If it's possible to train a body's immune system to react in a new way, it might also be possible to train it to fail to react. Instant allergy-proofing!
Proof if I ever heard of it that a) we have cellular memory, and b) allergies are propagate within the muscle tissue
Both my asthma and rhinitis are histamine responses, in particular by mast cells . Histamines trigger the inflammatory response, which is the immune system kicking in. IgE antibodies inspire the mast cell release, apparently, and I have IgE antibodies that are extremely sensitive to Eastern White Pine, English Plantain, and several other grasses and trees. Not so much ragweed, go figure.
I have particularly aggressive H1 receptors, which are primarily found (from Wikipedia) in "smooth muscle, endothelium, and central nervous system tissue"
Since these receptors are found in my lungs, in the brnchial tubes, it is rational to beleive that transplanting my lungs to someone else will give them my receptors. and since the receptors will generate histamine when triggered by allergens. And I would expect histamine to work the same in the recipient as it did in me, though I have not quite understood the role of IgE antibodies, and if they cause or are the result of the mast cell triggering. It is a safe bet that some of my antibodies will accompany a transplanted lung (or both), so the recipient will get some, and how those survive the transplant process is unknown to me.
BTW, the story is two years old...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
If you hear hooves, think horse not zebra.
Which is the more probable :
- The she was exposed to a trace of peanut exactly during the correct time frame for the T-helper cells to train her immune cells to produce peanuts-antibodies for the new mast cells ?
- Or that she's simply one of the many adults who develop a new allergy with no necessary history ?
I have no data for neither incidence, but it would be interesting to have a look which is more likely to happen.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I would have thought that the transplant drugs would function the same as allergy medication in that they dampen the response.
On a broader point of view, yes. But...
Allergy of this type are due to the "humoral immunity" - this part of the immune system which is responsible of secreting antibodies (which, in case of allergy, end up being attached on the cell wall of masts cells)
Graft rejection are due to "cellular immunity" - the part of the immune system which is responsible of killing un-recognized cells (either foreign cells, or cells hi-jacked by viruses)
Most last generation transplant drugs don't shut down the whole immune system (that would increase the risk of catching some random disease due to poor immune system).
But try to be as specific as possible and shut down only the reaction responsible for rejecting the graft, while at the same time leaving as much as possible of the rest of the immune system.
So when you look at the details, allergies of this type aren't that likely to be dampened by the transplant drugs.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
(Since I was just watching the season 2 DVD again today...) Unnatural Selection, the hyper-aging virus one.
Makes me wonder about the possibility that all allergies are transmitted this way, rather than being entirely genetic. You are, after all, spending a lot of time around people to whom you are related, presumably when they are exposed to allergens. Their cells responding to the allergen may spread to you through normal exposure and contact, not entirely dissimilar to the way hormones can, and train your cells to respond similarly. This would require, of course, that the two people are predisposed to "sharing" allergen responses.
Damn, I should have gone to college for biology instead of sports commentary. You don't get to come up with fun theories like this in sports.