And if so, has this ever been attempted? I thought about this when I read about some retired football player who gave a fellow player one, and (big surprise) a few months later the player who received it is near death.
And it reminds me of what Marge said to Homer after he gave on to Abe:
Lisa: I know you’re a little peeved at Grampa, dad, but you’ve
done a wonderful thing!
Marge: Yes! You’ve shortened your life significantly so someone
else can have a slight extension of theirs!
Nope. I donated a kidney a few years ago. We joke about my getting it back when he gets tired of it, but there is far too much of him in it now for my body to accept it without antirejection drugs.
While your kidney was in your friend’s body, certain of his white blood cells (lymphocytes and related cells)) would have entered it. So, if the kidney was put back into you, those lymphocytes would come along for the ride.
The kicker is that lymphocytes are the major players in the immune system. They are good killers of foreign tissue and from their perspective they’d now find themselves not just in a foreign kidney but in a foreign body too. Of course, they would also be recognized as foreign by your lymphocytes. There would be, therefore, real potential for immunological fireworks. I don’t know enough to predict how the show would end.
Wouldn’t it be possible to nuke the kidney to kill any dividing cells?
Yes (expose the kidney to potent chemotherapy type drugs before putting it back into the donor). In my post above, I was just speaking from a more theoretical perspective.
Would the medicine/ diseases involved for the initial recipient cause damage to a kidney and other organs? As a general rule, if someone has received an organ at some point in their lives, are they eligible to donate an organ when they die? Donating the “foreign” organ would cause many more complications (what with it already being a mix of two tissues), but what about the heart of a kidney recipient?
I imagine a bone marrow recipient couldn’t donate anything, seeing as how all their organs would be infused with blood that is already a mix from different origins.
Wouldn’t those die off over time, so that the anti-rejection drugs would only be needed temporarily?
I seem to recall reading (probably here) that the kidney they remove from a donor is in a different place than where they put it in the donee. Anyone know know what I’m talking about, and would it make a difference?
It’s the only way to be sure.
d&r
IANAD, but I doubt that any transplant center would take the risk.
Sure, the current and previous donors were good matches to begin with, and the donor organs would come with a base level of Prednisone or other anti rejection drug, but the combination of original donor and recipient-donor material would throw a curveball into the matching procedures and the anti rejection drugs would probably increase the risk of a false match.
Good question. Does anyone have the knowlege to make an informed guess?
The kidneys you are born with are located in the back part of your abdomen - to get a kidney biopsy on a “native kidney,” they go in through your back. When you get a kidney transplant, they put it in the front of your abdomen, and biopsy it through your tummy.
Why they do this, or how this would affect returning the transplanted kidney to its original owner, I have no idea.
love
yams!!
It would be a rare coincidence to need that kidney back. We can live quite well with only one. There are people born with only one who never know it. (found on autopsy)
Creatinine is one of the main markers for kidney health.
As you see from the quote, the level can double and still be within the normal range. Once one has donated, the level will raise to about double, but within a matter of weeks it will likely be back down to it’s original level.
The donated kidney could be damaged by the same disease that ruined the original equipment. Diabetes and polycystic disease are a couple examples.
The kidney would still have the donor’s genetic signature. There would be some recipient cells in the kidney, but they would eventually be gone, so KarlGauss and cornflakes are right to a point. If the recipient had required blood transfusions after the transplant, the antibodies from different donors could change how the kidney reacted to the original donor. Then
The big problem would be re-doing the anastomoses (the blood and urine hookups) since scar tissue would form the amount of healthy tissue might not be enough.
ZenBeam, the transplanted kidney is always placed in the abdomen. The retro-peritoneal space is very small, and hard to work in.
I once cared for a patient who had cancer. (renal cell carcinoma) He had surgery at another hospital where they removed the wrong kidney. Our transplant team removed his diseased kidney, excised the cancer, then re-planted it into his abdomen, just like a transplant. He did fine for several years.
My brother has kidney disease and he says that the urine protein level is a much more important indicator of renal function. Over the last 1.5 years he says his creatinine has steadily dropped from 1.7 to 1.3, but his urine protein has tripled, and that’s the only thing that really matters.
I have no idea if this is true or not but he’s done some pretty intensive studying so it would seem he must know what he’s talking about.
Blood contains lymphocytes, yet blood transfusions don’t cause this sort of thing (blood type matching is a different issue). But maybe a kidney would contain more.
I’m sorry, I was being a little too general. Creatinine is used as an indicator in early kidney damage/disease, because it’s the most stable in various situations.
Increasing protein is indeed, another indicator, however, protein can increase or decrease due to a number of transient situations. Pregnancy can cause protein spilling, as can dehydration, or an extremely high protein intake. It can return to normal when the stressor is removed in those cases.
Steadily increasing creatinine is an indicator of irreversible damage.
Blood urea nitrogen or BUN is another indicator of kidney health. It’s most often used in conjunction with creatinine to measure serial function.
picunurse I was also too general in my post. I’ve read just enough to have some idea as to what he’s talking about, and, to my uneducated self, it seems pretty weird.
His BUN is in the normal range, his creatinine in now only .1 out of normal, but his urine protein just keeps steadily going up. I have been unable to find anything on the web that addresses a situation such as this
But according to him his nephrologist has told him that his decreasing creatinine levels and BUN are just temporary anomalies, and that his steadily increasing urine protein says that these other indicators are soon to reverse course. I have offered one of my kidneys but he says it is not yet time and he isn’t sure he would want a transplant anyway.
I might add, he’s not just my brother, he’s also my best friend and this is really eating at me.