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limitless__ t1_iwc4qi0 wrote

People need to understand that transplants are never actually successful. When someone gets a new kidney/lung/heart the body wholeheartedly rejects it. The recipient has to take immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their life which does nothing more than slow down the bodies ability to reject the organ. But reject it will. Consider that only half the people who get a lung transplant (for example) live 5 more years.

So you have that approach or you have a prosthetic. Prosthetic wins.

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scheav t1_iwd2efw wrote

Most transplant recipients die from unrelated causes. The statistic you used for lung transplants is out of date, and it was largely influenced by the first few people to receive lung transplants. The average life-span increases every year.

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If the first lung transplant were done 5 years ago you could say that no lung transplant recipient lived longer than 5 years and you'd be [technically] correct, but thoroughly misleading.

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Ophthalmologist t1_iwd44ov wrote

https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/lung-transplant/about/pac-20384754

Mayo clinic states 5 year survival for lung transplant patients is around 50%. They usually keep their informational pages up to date.

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scheav t1_iwd6tyy wrote

Whether or not the statistic is out of date, my point still stands that most of these deaths aren’t due to rejection. The reason that lung transplants are needed in the first place is often the cause of other health issues. Some lung transplants are done for cystic fibrosis and the transplant isn’t a cure, as the new lungs will be damaged by the disease as well.

If you lose a leg due to diabetes you’ll likely have lower lifespan than if you lose a leg due to acute trama. Pointing to lung transplant survival as indicative of survival after a limb transplant is incorrect and disingenuous.

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Aviyara t1_iwh5rpu wrote

The three largest causes of death in solid-organ allografts (organ transplants) are cancer (which most immunosuppression courses are well-documented as increasing the incidence rate of), graft rejection, and infection.

I would not call any of these "unrelated causes." An allograft recipient is on immunosuppression for life.

You are correct, the prognosis of an allograft recipient gets better every year. This is not because allograft care in the late 20th century was spectacularly bad, and we're just making up for that statistical anomaly.

The first double-lung transplant recipient famously had her lungs outlive her.

Meanwhile, 41% of all lung transplant recipients in 2010 were dead by 2015.

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Ramjid t1_iwkgw9t wrote

Saying that they are "never actually successful" because they won't last a lifetime is pretty wild to be honest.

If that's your metric for success, you might as well call insulin shots or asthma inhalers or any kind of long-term treatment and surgical intervention "never actually successful".

I mean you're completely right: organ transplants aren't some kind of miracle cure and come with a huge heap of downsides and long-term consequences. They're a desperate measure for people in desperate situations.

But at least everyone involved knows this perfectly well and the stated goal here is never "to grant you a long and healthy life", but always "to improve your quality of life and prevent you from actively dying from organ failure right now".

It's important to remember that these are all people who've had years and often decades of suffering and therapy regimens and who have exhausted every "regular" treatment option available. With the possible exception of kidney recipients these are all people who went into surgery as severly ill as humanly possible without being dead.

These patients don't hope for or expect a long life free of illness. They just want to take a full breath again, leave hospital for a while and maybe get some independance back during whatever time remains.

And at that regard even lung transplants (which do have the worst long-term outcome of all) are hugely successful.

Many patients go from "permanently bed-bound, barely able to sit upright and literally dying" to not just "still alive" but to "fully independant, active, mobile and almost indistinguishable from a healthy person" in a matter of months and stay that way for years. And even those who don't recover quite so well or don't survive quite as long usually still end up with a way better quality of life than before and a longer life than they could have hoped for without a transplant.

Which by any sensible metric is a huge success indeed.

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