Do donated organs age according to the donor´s age or do they adapt to the age of the new body?
In:
Organs are made of cells, like pretty much the rest of your body.
A transplant procedure just hooks up the organ to the new body’s blood supply (veins and arteries), so that the cells inside the organ can have oxygen and food, and basically survive and do their jobs. That’s it.
There’s no “adapting”, the cells in the organ don’t change their DNA or makeup in any way, so basically they’ll live and divide and function based on the DNA that they have (which is, the donor’s DNA).
So, to answer your question, the organ “ages” according to the donor’s DNA and “age”.
But the biggest issue with transplanted organs is that the recipient’s immune system (which is in the blood), recognizes that the DNA of the organ is NOT from its own body, and attacks it as if it’s actually contamination. The immune system tries to kill all the cells in the organ, as if they were microbes.
To prevent this, every person receiving a transplant organ must go on medication to disable their own immune system from being so aggressive. Of course, if you disable a person’s immune system, they’ll get sick extremely easily, so you can’t disable it 100%. You can just reduce it a bit.
So the organ does eventually get attacked, because the immune system is not disabled, just reduced, so it does still attack the organ over time. 5 years, 10 years.
Basically, age isn’t a problem for the organ, as much as being “killed” by the new person’s immune system.
Neither. They age very quickly due to the recipients body attacking them. Even though we give anti rejection drugs, the immune system of the recipient will still attack the organ.
It’s pretty typical that an organ like a kidney will only last around 10 years.
as I know. different organs in body have different ages. almost all parts of your body replacing them selfs in a period from 1 to 10 years. it depends on particular cells lifecycle. this could be applied to donors I believe.
Eli5 answer: your age is the age of your organs/cells. So no they don’t adapt to the age of the new body.
*Edit: they’ll eventually somewhat adapt but the host will have to take medication for the rest of their life, so they’ll never fully adapt to the host.
Could an organ hypothetically be passed down from donor to donor? Leading to, for example, a liver that survived three people, maybe getting a record for oldest liver.
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Little by little we’re approaching a time when we can grow the organ we need from our own body. The closest to viability appears to be kidneys. Most of those working on this believe we’ll start growing our own kidneys as soon as 2025. There’s no reason to think many other organs won’t follow over time.
As a recipient it’s interesting to look at some of the comments. If more people donated the scenario of a kidney going back to a donor would not be an issue.
Plus many donations these days are from deceased donors so it’s not going to happen. Plus kidney wise you can have really low function before intervention is needed. I was at 2% kidney function just prior to dialysis and I was functioning just. But still at work etc just really tired.
“Aging” as far as we know is the result of the telomeres, the tips of the chromosomes which store your DNA, shortening with each cell division.
These don’t get longer if the organ whose cells they’re in is transplanted but instead continue to get shorter abd thus age accordingly so yes, the organ continues to age the same as it did before.
The shortening of the telomeres was actually a huge problem with cloning Dolly, since the cells she was created from were already much older than the cells of a newborn sheep should be.
The transplant maintains the original age and then effectively ages faster due to degeneration from the recipients immune response.
I have a corneal transplant, which although it is still a transplant, it is not as extreme as an internal organ in regards to immune suppression etc. I have a degenerative condition that advanced in my early 20’s. They held off surgery as long as possible because I was so young. Many transplants are eventually destroyed by the immune system and the earlier they start, the more I will need in my lifetime. I was originally told to expect failure in 10-15 years as transplants from older/middle age people are more common and tend to succumb to the immune destruction faster, however the transplant I received actually came from a younger person (never given exact age) so they are hoping this one will last 20-30 years.
Fun Fact – My transplant gets hay fever but I don’t. Just the one eye goes red and watery. My other eye and nose stay unaffected.
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