RESEARCHERS at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia have described what they believe to be the first known case of a heart transplant patient getting cancer from his donor heart. Their 58 year old patient received the heart which contained mestastic prostate cancer cells in February, 1994, from a 53 year old man who died of a brain haemorrhage. As the heart transplant was underway, doctors planning to harvest the man's other organs discovered cancer cells in pelvic lymph nodes but the clinical scenario dictated that the heart transplantation be completed, according to a report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
A biopsy 10 months later found a tumour on one of the recipient's ribs of the type caused by spreading prostate cancer, although his prostate showed no signs of the disease and the man survived at the time the article was written.
The researchers defended the incident, explaining that when a heart donor dies, doctors have a maximum of four hours to transplant the organ into the recipient. This gives them no time to look for diseases such as hidden cancers in the donor's body because the delay imposed would damage the heart, making the transplant "sub optimal or untenable".