Girl switches blood type

trekkie · **Posted:** January 24th, 2008, 11:18 am

i thought it was in interesting read

Quote:

SYDNEY (AFP) - An Australian girl spontaneously switched blood groups and adopted her donor's immune system following a liver transplant in the first known case of its type, doctors treating her said Thursday.

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 it was discovered that she had changed blood types and 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. Stormon said he had given several presentations on the case around the world and had heard of none like it.

"It is extremely unusual -- in fact we don't know of any other instance in which this happened," Stormon told AFP from the Children's Hospital.

"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.

Doctors who treated Brennan say she is now only under treatment as an outpatient and are interested to know if the case could have other applications in transplant surgery, where rejection of donor organs by the recipient's immune system is a major hurdle.

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.

Adbot · **Posted:** January 24th, 2008, 11:18 am

Pfkninenines · Global Moderator 12/4/08

No ****ing way :shock:

Switching blood types is bloody amazing! Wow, seriously no pun intended.

Sworder · **Posted:** January 24th, 2008, 4:50 pm

Wow, thats amazing... The first person to ever have done this on record? WOW

Pat · **Posted:** January 24th, 2008, 6:35 pm

Like the article said, the real task is to see if it can be replicated.

Chris · **Posted:** January 24th, 2008, 8:27 pm

That is quite funky. I watched the story on the news. I kind of feel sorry for her now because the doctors say they are going to do a bunch of research as to why this happened. The poor girl is going to be bugged around with for quite a while.

Mushroom Queen · **Posted:** January 24th, 2008, 8:33 pm

Chris wrote:

That is quite funky. I watched the story on the news. I kind of feel sorry for her now because the doctors say they are going to do a bunch of research as to why this happened. The poor girl is going to be bugged around with for quite a while.

Yeah, I understand that. But maybe she'll understand one day that she might be the key to saving a lot of lives since many people die when their body rejects the organ they've received.

Adbot · **Posted:** January 24th, 2008, 8:33 pm

Steven · **Posted:** January 24th, 2008, 8:47 pm

Mushroom Queen wrote:

Chris wrote:

That is quite funky. I watched the story on the news. I kind of feel sorry for her now because the doctors say they are going to do a bunch of research as to why this happened. The poor girl is going to be bugged around with for quite a while.

Yeah, I understand that. But maybe she'll understand one day that she might be the key to saving a lot of lives since many people die when their body rejects the organ they've received.

Well, most of the reason donated organs are rejected is because the doctors get the wrong blood type of the donor with the patient.

This is a amazing read. I've read this on annother site today.

Mushroom Queen · **Posted:** January 24th, 2008, 8:50 pm

Steven wrote:

Mushroom Queen wrote:

Chris wrote:

That is quite funky. I watched the story on the news. I kind of feel sorry for her now because the doctors say they are going to do a bunch of research as to why this happened. The poor girl is going to be bugged around with for quite a while.

Yeah, I understand that. But maybe she'll understand one day that she might be the key to saving a lot of lives since many people die when their body rejects the organ they've received.

Well, most of the reason donated organs are rejected is because the doctors get the wrong blood type of the donor with the patient.

This is a amazing read. I've read this on annother site today.

That's not true at all. Checking the blood type is very easy for doctors to do. They don't just plop a liver inside of you if they don't know your blood type. What I think happened in her case was that she might be an A positive blood type and they put in an O positive (universal blood type) liver and her body switched.

The reason why many bodies attack donated organs is that the person who receives the organ is usually immuno-suppressed at the time and the body recognises that it doesn't belong to the host body, so it sends antibodies to attack it. They can suppress this reaction by giving the person drugs, but sometimes they don't work.

Chris · **Posted:** January 24th, 2008, 9:25 pm

Actually, she was O- and her blood type changed to O+.

trekkie · **Posted:** January 24th, 2008, 10:08 pm

hmm that means she ended up getting the RH factor. i'm type O+. i guess the liver ended up mutating and gave her RH factor. i should give this article to my teacher she loves this stuff.

Ult_Mac_Dady · **Posted:** January 25th, 2008, 9:56 pm

trekkie wrote:

hmm that means she ended up getting the RH factor. i'm type O+. i guess the liver ended up mutating and gave her RH factor. i should give this article to my teacher she loves this stuff.

Just so everyone knows, RH=Rhesis Monkey and it just means + or - blood type.

Chris wrote:

Actually, she was O- and her blood type changed to O+.

If she was O- and turned O+, her body would have reacted to the O+ blood, clotted, and she would have died. Only possible ones...
O+ to O-
A+ to A- OR Any O
B+ to B- OR Any O
AB- to any -
AB+ to anything

Edit: Ah, they used immune suppressing agents (which is kinda dumb... just wait for another liver...).

http://www.citynews.ca/news/news_18945.aspx

Rynne528 · **Posted:** January 27th, 2008, 7:30 pm

That is still very amazing that she was able to have her blood type changed. I wonder if they will be able to do that more in the future. Who knows....