eli5: What does the body do when it rejects an organ transplant?
In: 6
Your white blood cells see it as an invader, something that doesn’t belong. It attacks it viciously as if it were a virus because it doesn’t know better. It kills it and as the organ fails it becomes toxic and it kills you, this isn’t what your body’s immune system wants. It doesn’t know better, it’s programmed that, if this isn’t our hosts e.g. your dna/cells Destroy it. each organ plays a vital role in your survival, you can lose some but others you can’t.
think of it like this….
your body is an airplane in the air, and all your cells and organs are the people. White blood cells are flight attendants
if you put in a foreign element into it, like an outraged karen, then the passengers are going to alert the flight attendents to the disturbance. They will evaluate and try to address it in a peaceful way, but if they can’t then they will restrain and subdue the karen until they can force them out.
Now, think about the transplanted organ fighting and killing the body it was transplanted in! (Gvh)
Want a good EIL5, Watch the anime cells at work, it’s still an anime but all info in it is 100% correct.
Your body has a very complicated immune system that is trained to attack anything it doesn’t recognize as part of yourself.
This is very good when you worry about foreign stuff like parasites and bacteria and stuff like that, that you don’t want to have in your body.
It less good when you have some foreign cells in your body as part of a transplant to keep you alive.
When you get a transplant they need to check whether it is close enough to your own body to not cause too much of a fuzz and they also need to give you drugs that suppress your immune system.
This keeps your own defenses from attacking the transplanted organ as a foreign invader, but it also keeps it from defending you properly from actual foreign invaders.
So either you have your own defenses kill the new organ cell by cell or your own defenses are so nerfed that every otherwise harmless infection can become a live and death thing.
it is very difficult thing to balance.
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