KIDNEY TRANSPLANT REJECTION

Kidney Transplant Rejection

Kidney Transplant Rejection

Introduction

Organ transplantation refers to the removing the donor's organ or tissue to the patient's body in order to replace the failing ones due to different diseases or other factors. The earliest organ transplant was done in 1954 in United States about the transplant of kidney between identical twins.

Discussion

The most common transplant done was kidney transplant, but due to the advanced technologies introduced these days, other organs such as heart, kidney, liver, lungs, pancreases and some parts of small intestines.

Even though organ transplant seem to be one of the simplest way to avoid all the inconvenience due to organ failing, there are many limitations and more of the issues arise since the first operation done in 1954.

Since the first organ transplant done in 1954, the scientists worked so hard to improve the success rate of organ transplant operation. The main threats that exist in every organ transplant surgery are mainly about how easy it is to preserve the organ and the immune rejection that occur in our body.

The organ transplant which has highest success rate is the kidney transplant, which has an 80% to 90% success rate. The least success rate among all transplant operations is the liver transplant, which has only a success rate of 45%.

There limitations which hinder the success operation of organ transplant can be dividing into 2 category, the problem of the donor and the problem with the recipient.

The hospital will refuse donors from donating their organ which have positive result to the presence of HIV, active cancer or active infection. But there are still exceptions, patient who has hepatitis C and hepatitis B can donate to patient with hepatitis C and B respectively. In the case for the organ receivers, the main problem occur is about the tissue rejection caused by the immune system. Our immune system plays the role of security in our body which has the ability to recognize the difference between our own tissue and the foreign intruding living substances. As the organ is transplanted into the body of patient, the antigen in both the tissue and our body will not recognize teach other, so it will “attack” each other which cause the damage of the organ and organ failure, which will finally result in death. In olden days, doctors will prefer to do operations for patients with the organ donated from a closer relative for a higher chance of survival since the antigen of close blood relationship are more similar, and will have lesser chance of 'attack' between tissues and immune system. Even though scientists these days figured out ways to solve this problem, many side effects and afterward monitoring are still required. By injecting medicines to 'trick' the immune system and into accepting the new transplanted organ, the immune system gets weaker which might result in easy infection, and also regular blood monitor and other tests are required to be done too. Organ transplant is not elixir for all the organ ...