Watching an old episode of MASH and they’re taking an artery out of one guy and putting it into another. How can they do this without fear of rejection when things like kidneys or lungs need to have anti rejection drugs for life?
In: Biology
You can’t. Don’t rely on television for accurate medical depiction.
When someone needs an aortic graft, doctors take a cylindrical metal mesh and place it inside the weak part of the vessel. This stops the vessel from literally exploding by giving it a lot of support.
If the aneurism has already burst, they sew it closed again and then place the mesh inside. This is very hard to survive – it’s something like 10% survival rate from a burst aortic aneurism, if that. I know a man who had an aortic aneurism rupture while he was in hospital waiting to have his aneurism sured up, and they couldn’t save his life.
If you need a human vessel to replace a completely shredded blood vessel, they take one from your leg. That is how you get around rejection.
Things like that are called tissue grafts. They are treated in a way that makes them not recognizable to the immune system, so they don’t get attacked by it and rejected. Full organs still have to work like the original organ, so you can’t treat them in the same way. It’s hard to say if MASH was medically correct, since it is a 50 year old show about a war 70 years ago. But I suspect that they may have been showing a temporizing procedure–taking a graft directly from one guy, not treating it to prevent rejection, but knowing they would evacuate the guy to a full medical facility where they could replace the graft. This might have been a thing before artificial grafts were commonplace.
Edit: In a lot of the cases of tissue grafts, they are put in places where it is hard for immune system cells to get to. In the particular case of blood vessel grafts, despite having blood going through them, they ironically have no blood supply of their own. So, immune cells can’t really get inside the tissue to destroy it easily
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