California man dies from an unusual lung cancer spread from another person

A man from California tragically died after developing

lung cancer

from another person in a rare and unusual medical case. The 41-year-old unnamed patient had chronic liver disease. The man had to undergo a liver transplant and got the organ from a deceased donor in 2001.
The donor, who was a 63-year-old man was later found to have undetected lung cancer. The donor died of a stroke and had no known history of cancer. So, the transplant was carried out and the

California

man got the liver. After the transplant, when the autopsy was done on the donor, the doctors found that the man had a

metastatic pulmonary adenocarcinoma

, a type of lung cancer that had gone undetected before the donation. The cancer was so small that it didn’t show up in standard pre-transplant imaging.

Upon detecting the lung cancer, the doctors told the California with hepatitis B cirrhosis to undergo a second emergency transplant to get rid of the disease. The second transplant was successfully done after seven days.

The California man recovered from the second surgery. As a precaution, the doctors asked him to do a CT scan after 10 months of the transplant, and it showed no signs of cancer in his chest, abdomen, or pelvis. However, about six weeks after the scan, the man developed abdominal pain, vomiting, and a feeling of fullness. When the doctors ran a few tests including blood tests, fluid analysis, and body scans, they were shocked to find the metastatic pulmonary adenocarcinoma – the same type of cancer as his first donor.

The immunosuppressant drugs given to the patient had allowed the cancer to grow and spread, even if it was for a brief period of 7 days. The doctors prescribed chemotherapy, however, a month after this diagnosis he developed fluid buildup and a blood clot in his legs. Though he was admitted to the hospital for treatment, he died within 24 hours.

“Clearly, tumor cells had escaped the confines of the transplanted liver within one week after transplantation and gained access to the general circulation,” the doctors wrote in their report. Looking at the rare and unusual circumstance of the cancer transmission they said, it is the “first case in the literature of donor cancer transmission” despite removing the first organ and the recipient undergoing a second transplant.
It is also one of only a handful of cases in the US, where cancer has transmitted from the donor to the recipient.
(Pic courtesy: iStock)