Girl changes blood type after liver transplant

[MonkeyFunk]

http://www.physorg.com/news120396291.html


Australian girl switched blood type after transplant: doctors

An Australian girl spontaneously changed blood groups and adopted her donor's immune system after a liver transplant, in what doctors treating her said Thursday was the first known case of its type.


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.

Nine months later they discovered she had changed blood types and that her immune system had switched over to that of the donor after stem cells from the new liver migrated to her bone marrow.

She is now a healthy 15-year-old, Michael Stormon, a hepatologist treating her, told AFP. He said he had given several presentations on the case around the world and had heard of none like it.

[ananda]

1. That's amazing!

Isn't that amazing!

I wonder if doctors will be able to do that
for others now that they know that infusing
bone marrow with liver stems might have such
fantastic results????

[Eurobabe]

2. Interesting...

When I had my 2nd daughter, she was A+, despite my husband and I being both O+, the hospital tried to tell us that there is no way she could be "our" baby. Never did get a straight answer on this...perhaps mine was an immaculate conception? :rofl:

[Thor_MN]

8. You or your husband could be a chimera.

It is possible for a person to have different portions of their body originating from different DNA. The sex organs could have different DNA than the bone marrow. There was a case where a genetic testing was done on a family to establish paternity. The results came back saying that the man was indeed the father, but the woman was not the mother. Since she obviously knew that she gave birth to her daughter, they did more testing. The solution proved to be that the skin cells from mother's mouth were genetically distinct from the cells of her ovaries.

I don't recall if it's from separately fertilized eggs fusing into one normal embryo, but I think that was what the most likely senario is. The article said that it could be much more common than anyone would think, only genetic testing would be able to prove the most common cases. I believe that some chimerism is more obvious, where the child actually has two fathers - differences in skin pigmentation is usually the giveaway.

[Duer 157099]

3. Flip-flopper

But in this case, that's a good thing :D

[RaleighNCDUer]

4. I was under the impression that transplants across blood type

were usually rejected by the recipient.

Shows what I know...

[Lasher]

5. Wow!

I had no idea such a thing could be possible. We have much to learn.

[TechBear_Seattle]

6. A sponaneous example of the cutting edge in anti-rejection research?

This is especially fascinating in light of this post about translplanting bone marrow as well as organs, to in effect "teach" the recipient's immune system to treat the new organ as "me" rather than as a foreign invader.

:wow:

[ismnotwasm]

7. This puzzled me

Since I work in transplant. (Whaddya mean she switched her blood type, I was thinking)Evidently what she did was switch from O negative, to O positive, and then the stem cell did the rest of the work.
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20080125/liver_transplant_080125/20080125?hub=Health

Absolutely fascinating.

And may I mention here, that in my opinion, the waste of air we call a president stalled stem cell research for no other reason than he really, really hates life?

[Swede]

9. My neice was O+ as a child and O- as an adult.

Not sure how that happened.

[sakabatou]

10. Weird.....