A UK resident died after doctors transplanted a cancer-affected kidney into him by mistake. The case is described as rare in medical reports and has attracted broad attention in the press.
Parminder Singh Sidhu had kidney problems starting when he was 30 years old, about nineteen years ago. He received a kidney transplant in his native India in 2005 without complications.
After moving to West London with his family, he developed kidney issues again during the lockdown period and began regular dialysis sessions. The treatment limited his ability to work, prompting him to pursue another transplant.
In 2021 he underwent surgery at Hammersmith Hospital, a major kidney transplant center in Europe. During the winter prior to the operation, he began to experience pain in his hip. Scans then revealed a 7 centimeter tumor in the transplanted kidney. Sidhu chose to have the kidney removed, but doctors later discovered that cancer had spread to his spine. He died in March 2022, a year after the operation.
Investigations showed that the body scan conducted four months after the transplant did not initially raise alerts. The initial assessment identified a small lesion, approximately one centimeter, as a cyst, which later proved to be an aggressive cancer. The donor was a woman who had no known history or symptoms of cancer and had died from head trauma. Tests indicated that the patient’s cancer was not lymphoma, a type sometimes linked to immunosuppressive drugs used to prevent organ rejection, which can hinder the body’s ability to fight tumors.
Two other recipients of organs from the same donor subsequently developed cancer. Such cases are exceedingly rare, accounting for a fraction of a percent of the roughly 80,000 transplants performed each year. Medical teams stressed that this particular instance was unusual and that they could not determine a clear reason for the cancer to arise in this donor kidney.