eli5: What does the body do when it rejects an organ transplant?
In: 6
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.
Latest Answers