Girl Switches Blood Type After Liver Transplant In First Known Case: Doctors

Girl Switches Blood Type After Liver Transplant In First Known Case: Doctors

news.yahoo.com

SYDNEY (AFP) - An Australian girl spontaneously switched blood groups and adopted her donor's immune system following a liver transplant in the first known case of its type, doctors treating her said Thursday.
Demi-Lee Brennan was aged nine and seriously ill with liver failure when she received the transplant, doctors at a top Sydney children's hospital told AFP.

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This is an amazing story. Until this day, mixing blood types has been a death sentence.
Perhaps science will be able to decipher the why's and how's and come up with a way to allow various blood types into a single host. This would especially help those with very rare blood types.

news.yahoo.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Interesting.

I work in a Pediatric hospital that is a Major transplant center (heck I go pick up alot of the kids just for that reason) and there has been some literature about basicall giving the child chemo prior to the transplant to blast out the bone marrow and then do a bone marrow transplant with the donors marrow to achieve the same affect. It has been a mixed bag the last time I looked and we do not do it here at this time.

The limitations to that are that the organs are limited to what can be given by a living related donor so that liver and kidney because you have to do the bone marrow transplant pre organ transplant which would be impossible otherwise.

This little girl got lucky especially if she does not require all of those immunosupressive drugs

The real miracle IMHO is if they can figure out how to duplicate it so transplant recipients can benifit from it

reply to post by FredT


I came across an article about this yesterday, which made for interesting reading:

In the first study at Stanford University, a man who received his brother's kidney has gone for two years without drugs after his doctors tweaked his immune system with irradiation and antibody treatments.

He then received an infusion of his brother's blood cells. This combined treatment created a kind of "peacekeeping" immune cell, which appeared able to avert the attack on the foreign organ.

The second study was conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Five patients were given treatment that partially destroyed their bone marrow and with it the white blood cells which cause rejection.

This bone marrow was then replaced with a bone marrow graft from the donor, and the kidney followed.

One of the five rejected the kidney, but the other four have so far been able to live with normal kidney function and without drugs - the longest for over five years.

source

Interesting times we live in - in years to come there may be no more transplant problems because of these pioneers.

This is one of the most shocking and bizarre things I have every read. I really must read more about the cannabilisation of cadavers for transplant body parts to see if there are any other such curiosities.


I never paid attention to the stories of heart transplant patients who experienced complete personality changes and appeared to have memories via the donated/harvested heart that were not their own.

While a leap, I suspect this change in blood type may well fit into a host of verifiable experiences and results that would make us wonder about this kind of scientific/medical endeavour.

[edit on 24/1/08 by Pellevoisin]

There is an often told story in my wife's family about a nephew who was listed as an A+ in early childhood. It seems it was on his records. Then later, as an adult, he went in to have some work done, and they said he was O+.

I always figured there was just a mix-up of some sort. But considering how strange her family is, and now this, I'm about to become a believer.

Originally posted by NGC2736
There is an often told story in my wife's family about a nephew who was listed as an A+ in early childhood. It seems it was on his records. Then later, as an adult, he went in to have some work done, and they said he was O+.

I always figured there was just a mix-up of some sort. But considering how strange her family is, and now this, I'm about to become a believer.

When my Mother was in her forties she had some bloodwork done.
The Doctors told her that her blood type had changed and that her blood was worth its weight in gold.

I never really gave it much thought but now I wish I had asked her more questions about it.
She has Alziemers now and probably wouldn't remember anything about it.

I have worked in a blood bank for 23 years and you can "mix" blood, as I am sure most of you know, as long as it is a good mix... type O blood into A or B or AB and not the other way round.

You would be surprised how often people think their blood type is one thing and it is something else.

The mothers blood who is worth a lot could have developed a rare Antibody to a red cell antigen. The serum, is then used to help manufacture reagents. Some companies, although I am not positive, pay for the serum from these donors.

In the case of the girl with the liver transplant, it certainly sounds rare. Change in type is not uncommon for marrow recipients but a solid organ certainly sounds unusual.

Interesting post thanks.

I don't have this, but it does run in my family as my sister and my paternal grandmother both do.

There are people who have blood types that are variants. DU Variant is a blood type (O in our case) where the person has a weak RH factor. So they are RH+ but may show up as being RH- or flip back and forth between + and -.

Usually this is a transcription error at birth and is not heritable. In very rare cases it is a heritable trait as it appears to be in mine line.

reply to post by Aeons


The intital testing would/could appear weakly postive or negative but if the test is carried out to a second step the positive result shows. And called Du variant.