A California man has died after getting cancer from someone else in an extremely rare case

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A California man who received a life-saving liver transplant died less than a year later from cancer he got from his donor. The incident shocked the medical community, given the fact that such cases are almost non-existent.

The 41-year-old man suffered from chronic liver disease and received a liver from a deceased donor in 2001. Doctors later discovered that the donor had undiagnosed lung cancer. And tragically, the same type of lung cancer also killed the transplant patient just one year after the operation, even though he underwent a second liver transplant to combat the disease.

The doctors who treated the case explained that “the tumor cells escaped from the transplanted liver just one week after the operation and entered the general circulation.” They also pointed out that this is the first documented case in the literature of cancer transmission from a donor, although the original organ was removed and the patient received a liver transplant from another donor.

The case is a rarity in the United States, where only a few such events have been reported. Doctors believe that cancer cells, too small to be detected by scans, moved from the donor’s lungs to the transplanted liver, which explains why the organ was deemed “cancer-free” and declared safe for transplant.

Only a few documented cases of cancer transmission through transplantation

The patient initially required a liver transplant due to liver cirrhosis caused by hepatitis B. The donor, a 63-year-old man who had died of a stroke, had no history of cancer. Pre-transplant tests did not indicate the presence of cancer, but a post-mortem autopsy revealed metastatic lung cancer.

Shortly thereafter, the man who received the transplant was put on the waiting list for another liver, which he received seven days after the donor’s diagnosis. The initial recovery looked promising, but 10 months after the operation, the patient was diagnosed with the same type of lung cancer as his donor.

Immunosuppressive drugs given to prevent organ rejection can be an aggravating factor, helping the cancer to proliferate, which has thus become much more aggressive. Chemotherapy was recommended, but shortly after diagnosis, the patient developed severe complications, including fluid build-up and blood clots in his legs, and died just a month after diagnosis.

This rare case highlights the unknown risks of organ transplants, and studies show that there are only a few documented cases of cancer transmission through transplants. Despite the extremely low risks, sporadic cases of cancer transmitted from donors have been identified in the literature. According to a 2013 report analyzing these cases, there are no accurate statistics on the risks of cancer transmission in such conditions.

Although the cases are extremely rare, the authors of the specialized studies pointed out that the available data are insufficient and it is possible that the real risks are underestimated. Breast cancer, colon cancer, liver cancer, lung cancer, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer and kidney cancer are among the types of cancer that have been transmitted in such cases, even if their numbers are extremely small.