A UK resident has died after doctors mistakenly transplanted a cancer-affected kidney to him. Rare cases reported daily mail.
Parminder Singh Sidhu suffered kidney problems 19 years ago at the age of 30. In 2005, he had a kidney transplant in his native India without any complications.
Then the man and his family moved to West London. He developed kidney problems during the coronavirus lockdown and began attending dialysis sessions at the hospital. The treatment kept the normally healthy father of two children from working as much as he wanted, so he decided to have another transplant.
In 2021, he had surgery at Hammersmith Hospital, one of the largest kidney transplant centers in Europe. In the winter of that year, the man began to have pain in his hip. Further scanning revealed a 7 cm tumor in the transplanted kidney. Paraminder decided to remove the kidney, but doctors failed to realize that the cancer had already spread to the spine, and he died in March 2022, just a year after surgery.
As it turned out, the doctors scanned the patient’s body four months after the “successful” transplant, during which a tumor about one centimeter in size was found. Doctors took it as a cyst, and later it turned out to be a very aggressive form of cancer.
The doctors had no reason to doubt the organ, as the donor woman had no history or symptoms of cancer and the woman died from head trauma. Tests showed that the man’s cancer was not lymphoma, which is seen in about 2% of kidney transplants, due to the effect of immunosuppressant drugs that prevent the immune system from fighting tumors.
Two other patients who received organs from the same donor later developed cancer. Such cases account for only 11 out of 80,000 transplants per year. Doctors said that this case was very rare, and even looking back, they couldn’t find a reason why this transplant didn’t happen.