Anti-rejection medications are taken by a patient after they receive a transplanted organ to suppress the body’s immune response to foreign tissue and bodies. Without the drugs, the body’s immune system would attack the foreign organ and destroy it because the body would perceive the organ to be a threat, much like a virus.
Because these drugs must repress the immune system those patients on anti-rejection medications are at risk of catching severe cases of pneumonia, influenza, and even common colds that can kill them, because their immune system is extremely weak in its suppressed state.
As these medications must be taken for life – or until the transplanted organ is removed, as in this case – and are very powerful and dangerous even for normal, relatively healthy, adults, many bioethicists have raised the question of how such medications will affect a developing child.
Never thought of that before, but...
According to the New England Journal of Medicine, more than 14,000 successful births have been reported by women with transplanted organs worldwide since transplantations the first transplant in 1954. The short-term effects on these children seem to be minimal, if non-existent; but it is only now that the opportunity to collect data on the long-term effects of immunosuppressants has arisen.
(...)
It is currently known that the risk of congenital malformations associated with such immunosuppressant drugs as calcineurin inhibitors, azathioprine, and prednisone (a steroid) are probably low. Animal studies, however, have suggested that there may be a problem, particularly with the calcineurin inhibitors, of autoimmune disease in children who are exposed in utero to such medications. As for other agents, such as rapamycin and mycophenolate mofetil, their effects are still unknown.
source.
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