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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."
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.
Yeah, you know, they cause the immune system to react LESS than otherwise. But if you've actually RTFA, you would have read,
If an allergic reaction is triggered during the first few days after the transplant, while the donor’s antibodies are still present, the donor’s T cells are able to train the recipient’s B cells to react to the allergen.
This seems to be what happened: Five days after her lung transplant the recipient ate a candy bar with peanuts. She had a minor reaction but it was relatively benign due to the immune suppressing drugs she was taking for the transplant; her reaction was confused with normal complications of lung transplants. But that first taste of peanut was all that her body needed to prime her for the almost-deadly reaction seven months later. And the woman continues to be allergic to peanuts to this day.
More interesting thing would be if something like blood donations can result in allergy transplantation as well?? I know they separate the immune system out of the blood cells, but can you separate out the antibodies too??
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.
it is strange occurrences like this that can have huge impacts on medical science. research into this could very well yield insight into how food allergies develop and possibly ways to treat or reverse them, or also new ways to keep a person's body from rejecting a newly transplanted organ. both of which are immune responses.
Conversely, if there were a way to safely transplant the acquired immunity of a guy in India who drinks from the ganges every day, that would be great.
I'm a clod, you insensitive zebra!