Organ Transplant - Research Paper Example

In the U.S alone over 28,000 patients under transplant surgeries and over half of these surgeries are kidneys transplants while a quarter are liver transplants. Process of Organ Transplantation Organ transplantation calls for therapeutic usage of organs to replace a non-functional organ. However, the medical process is quite complex since organ transplantation comes with its own bag of complications and challenges. Keeping aside the legal issues and paperwork involved, the first step i.e. procurement of a healthy donor is a mammoth task since it care should be taken that the blood types of the recipient as well as the donor matches since “fate of a graft depends not only on excellent surgery with avoidance of damage to the organ in the process, but, as indicated above, the degree of HLA matching of donor and recipient is crucial in any approach to tolerance” (Calne, 2005, p1979).

One a suitable candidate is found the healthy organ is harvested carefully and the damaged organ in the recipient’s body is surgically replaced with the new healthy organ. Post-surgery, the newly replaced organ is kept under observation to detect rejection by the recipient’s body. Immunosuppressant drugs are administered to help the body accept the new organ and gradually integrate it in the patient’s body as its own. . Such phenomena lead to organ rejection or blood transfusion reaction.

Heavy immunosuppressant drugs are therefore administered after a transplant surgery. Therefore, it is necessary to match the donor and receiver’s blood so that the organ acceptation by the receiver’s body is smoother. The rejection mechanism of allograft kidney transplantation was studies and it was seen that “the most common form of acute allograft rejection is initiated when donor alloantigens are presented to the T lymphocytes of the recipient by antigen-presenting cell (APC’s) “(Schwartz, 2010, p1453).

A new study shows that Jagged2 plays an important role in accelerating heart transplants or cardiac tissue grafts since its signaling affects the acceptation rate of graft by regulating interleukin-6 (Riella et al, 2013, 1449). Ethics and Importance of Organ Donation Becoming a donor is a tough choice for many. There are 2 types of donor-living donor and deceased donor. Organ donation is an important choice that can save a lot of lives however, organ donation, in many parts of the world, has rapidly emerged into a trade.

For example, poor people sell one of their kidneys to the rich and since The risk involved in nephrectomy is not in itself high, and most people regard it as acceptable for living related donors (Radcliffe, 1998, p1951). However some people find the procedure too invasive and thereby refuse the whole idea of organ transplantation (NHMRC,1997,P12). Brain death and organ donation Organs are procured from cadavers however brain dead individuals provide fresher organs for harvest. This, stirs up an ethical issue since complete loss of brain function needs to