Submitted to biologyonline.com on March 7, 2009
Published by biologyonline.com on March 29, 2009
Transplants are one of
the most miraculous achievements of modern medicine. They involve the donation
of organs from one person to another and enable about thousands of people to
take on a new lease of life all over the world every year.
In fact, transplants are
the best possible treatment for most people with organ failure. Kidney
transplants are the most commonly performed. Nevertheless, as medicine
advances, transplants of the heart, liver and lungs are also regularly carried
out nowadays. However, this process still suffers from such as shortage of the
available organs.
There are many types of
transplant for instance Autograft, Allograft, Isograft and Xenograft (xenotransplantation).
Autograft is the transplant of tissue to the same person and Isoograft is the
transplantation of organ or tissue from a donor to a genetically identical
recipient like the twins. Besides that, Xenograft is a transplant of organs or
tissues from one species to another. The last kind of transplants which I will
focus on is the Allograft, which is a transplant of an organ or tissue between
two genetically non-identical members of the same species. Most human tissue and organ transplants are
Allografts.
However, the medical
problem which the recipient will suffer from is that the recipient’s immune system will
identify the organ as foreign and attempt to destroy it, causing what so-called
transplant rejection and to prevent this, the
organ recipient must take immunosuppressants. This dramatically affects
the entire immune system, making the body vulnerable to pathogens and this is the obvious medical effect of transplant
on the recipient. Other emotional effects may occur such as sexual difficulty,
guilty feelings, feelings of gratitude, worthlessness and indebtedness.
Moreover, a recent research illustrates that recipients are most likely to
undergo a depressed period. In addition, the emotional effects on the donor
family are not really obvious but it may include being sorrowful in rare cases,
on the other hand some families feel proudness and gladness for saving someone
soul.
To sum up, transplants
are saving peoples’ life and no body should argue against especially when the
donor continues to live after the operation. And it is a perfect way to get the
god’s gratification.
— Mohammed A.J Ahmed
