My son had open heart surgery when he was three months old. He received a blood transfusion during the surgery. My question is: Does the antibodies and immune system carry over to the recipient of the blood from the donor? For example if the donor, in the past ,had chicken pox, certain strain of the flu or cold etc and were immune would the recipient also become immune after the transfusion?
No.
In simplified terms blood cells don’t reproduce, they are produced by the bone marrow. Once the cells in the transfusion die of old age, that’s it. They get replaced by new cells from the recipient’s own tissue.
And of course since the blood cells aren’t able to reproduce, neither are any antibodies.
:dubious:How then are antibodies able to be absorbed orally? As is hammered into any new parent the colostrum is a big deal because it has the mother’s antibodies in it.
I’m not sure I understand the question. 
Colostrum antibodies don’t reproduce inside the child. Once they cease being absorbed the child becomes susceptible to the disease very rapidly.
Yea you are right, I know they don’t reproduce but I was under the impression exposure to the mothers antibodies had a lasting effect of some kind on the infant’s immune system.
Not that I’m aware of. AFAIK once the antibodies stop being absorbed, immunity declines immediately and vanishes entirely within months. That’s why so many immunisations have to be given again after 12 months. The colostrum prevents immunity developing, but it gives no long-term protection.
If you look at infant disease statistics in countries or areas with really high breast-feeding levels, there is a noticeable spike in disease onset that correlates with the gap between when the mother stops breastfeeding and the kid gets their vaccinations - narrowing or eliminating that gap is one of the main reasons for the push to keep mothers breastfeeding at least until and preferably past six months (most infants can process “solid” food at around 6 months). Pediatricians can’t give immunizations any earlier for safety, but if they can keep mom’s protection going until that point is reached, that makes it safer for everyone involved.
Please don’t ask me for a cite today - but if you need on that badly, I can get it for you on Monday when I’m not visiting family.
Back on topic, there’s actually a study going where people are purposefully being made into chimeras for organ transplants. Basically, they get a bone-marrow transplant first from the person who is donating the organ, and then they are slowly weaned off of immunosuppressives and the new bone marrow begins producing alongside the original. Once both sets of blood types and identifying markers exist in harmony, then the transplant happens, and the person doesn’t have to spend a lifetime on dangerous immunosuppressive drugs because their body recognizes the organ as being a natural part of themselves.
Once the procedure is tested and proven safe enough, I can see this becoming standard for all organ transplants and perhaps even a common treatment option for people with blood disorders - if you need blood transfusions pretty constantly, and you’re a rare blood type, how fantastic if you could become a chimera with the most common blood type instead!
Again, cites for the organ transplant chimerism can happen on Monday if needed. Shouldn’t be too hard to look up on Google however.
I don’t see how this answers the question. Please help!
Whatever antibodies may have been present in that blood have long since been destroyed by your son’s own immune system. The antibodies in blood are mainly present in the plasma portion, so if your son got packed red blood cells, which is what “blood transfusion” generally means, then his exposure to anyone else’s antibodies was minimal.
As for the “immune system” carrying over, I’m not sure what you mean. The antibodies, yes, possibly, for a short time. But the immune system is a whole family of cells, and the bone marrow that produces them, and the tissues in which the cells reside to protect the body from intruders. Obviously all of that did not get transferred over with the unit of blood.
That said, there is a rare condition associated with blood transfusions, called Transfusion-associated graft-vs-host disease. More common if the recipient is immunocompromised, this situation arises when any donor lymphocytes (white blood cells, the ass-kickers of the immune system) aren’t destroyed by the recipient’s immune system like they should be. This allows the donor lymphocytes to attack the new host, because to them, everything they see is now a foreign intruder and they’re going to do their job. TA-GvHD can kill, and it’s very serious. Thankfully, with the use of special filters in the blood collection and processing stages, donor units of red blood cells contain very few white cells. For immunocompromised patients, hospitals can go one step further and irradiate the units prior to transfusion, so that any remaining white cells are killed off and rendered useless.
Does this help?
Yes…I guess it has just always amazed me how he hardly ever gets sick. I thought the other reason would be from me breast feeding him unil 9 months old, but not so sure about that now that I have read the above posts on breast feeding. Thanks everyone!
Not sure what you are saying here. I thought the colostrum provided temporary immunity and aided in the development of antibodies. Nothing I know much about, but I’d like to understand how it would prevent immunity from developing.
I think the confusion is with the term “immunity”. When you’re exposed to a virus, say, your immune system makes antibodies against it, and then we can say you’ve developed immunity.
When the baby is passively taking in antibodies from the colostrum, he’s not getting a chance to make his own immunity, because Mom’s antibodies are attacking the baddies before his immature immune system can get a shot at them.
Its actually backwards from what most people think. Breast feeding, via its close contact with mom is giving baby low grade exposure to a variety of pathogens on moms skin and body that babys body learns to fight.
There is no mechanism by which cell mediated immunity is transferred from mom to baby.
Thanks guys. This is making sense.
No, not really. The immunity lasts for those first few weeks, that’s all. But since that is the most dangerous time for an infant, it’s really important. If the child survives the first month or two, it’s likely to survive much longer. So that could be called ‘a lasting effect’.
Related question: well, first of all since I’m an “O” (universal donor) I should be donating blood-how often should/can I do so?
The question I wanted to ask however is whether any research team somewhere would be interested in my antibodies. I’m around sneezing and runny-nosed little kids all day long, yet I rarely get sick (like once a year on average, and so far IIRC I am on a 17 month sickness-free streak).
You can donate a unit of blood every 56 days, or approximately every two months. Depending on whether you meet more stringent donor criteria, you have the option of giving two units in one shot as a “double red cell” donation, and you can only do that half as often. Redcrossblood.org has all the info you could possibly want about donor eligibility.
Unless you’ve got antibodies against something specific and important, there’s little chance anyone will be interested in them, I’m sorry to say. It’s possible there may be research studies going on, about the common cold or what have you, and some researchers may be interested but I would not have any idea how to begin searching for that. Sometimes you’ll see ads in the paper for “study participants”, that’s the sort of thing you’d be looking for.
Antibodies are a function of white blood cells. In one ml of blood there are 5.5 billion red cells and 5000-10,000 white cells. In a unit of packed cells there are even fewer white cells, as they are separated to be used by others.
Your child got an even smaller number of wbcs because a transfusion for a 3 month old is a smaller volume of donated packed cells, called a pedi-pack, usually about 100 mls per transfusion.
That said, during open heart surgery he did get more blood in that the cardio-pulmonary by-pass machine requires much more than his tiny body has. But, once again, the blood was in the form of packed RBCs, so very few WBCs.
How old is he now?
The thing is, babies don’t get sick from infectious diseases nearly as much as school aged kids. The primary reason is that we keep them cleaner than we do school aged kids, and they’re not around other kids as much, and we wash our hands more before handling them.
If we washed our hands and our preschoolers as often and kept them home, they wouldn’t be sick very often, either. But send the dirty little germ havens to school and they swap all sorts of new and interesting illnesses.
He’ll probably start getting sick more often when he goes to daycare or preschool. Not because his immune system is any weaker than it is right now, but because he’ll be exposed to more germs.
He is now 9 years old! His one year older brother that he shares, his room, bathroom, toys etc with just had the flu and he didn’t get sick…happens all the time and even if he does get sick it’s very mild. He has always been like that. So let me ask this question…Once we have gotten chicken pox we never get it again…what is it on our bodies that keeps us from getting it again? Is it in our blood? If so can that be transferred over to the recipient of the blood? Or I can ask this way…if I never had the chicken pox and the recipient I received the blood from had it in the past and was immune, could I still get the chicken pox or would I also be immune???