Thursday, January 24, 2008

Could be a miracle

From Yahoo! News - a nine-year-old girl, upon receiving a new liver, got some pleasantly unexpected baggage along with it: a new immune system and a new blood type. This was six years ago. Now she's much healthier than before the transplant--thank goodness!

Michael Stormon, a hepatologist treating her, [said]..."It is extremely unusual -- in fact we don't know of any other instance in which this happened...In effect she had had a bone marrow transplant. The majority of her immune system had also switched over to that of the donor."

An article on the case was published in Thursday's edition of the leading US medical journal The New England Journal of Medicine...

Stormon said it appeared that Brennan may have been fortunate because a "sequence of serendipitous events", including a post-transplantation infection, may have given the stem cells from her donor's liver the chance to proliferate.

The task now was to establish whether the same sort of outcome could be replicated in other transplant patients, he said.

What a miracle.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is an interesting story. I have scientist/researcher friends who told me some similar things about transplanting into the bowel. It will be great if they find a way to improve the immune system.