Kidney cancer transplant patient dies

An investigation has indicated that the death of a London resident was caused by a kidney transplant he received in 2021, the British newspaper reported. Parminder Singh Sidhu, 49, who died in March this year, was accidentally given an unidentified cancerous organ before surgery. Daily mail. In addition to Sidhu, two patients who received organs from the same donor later developed cancer.

Parminder Singh, who resides in the Hounslow district in the west of the British capital, first suffered from kidney problems at the age of 30. Still living in India in 2005, he had an uncomplicated transplant. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he felt pain in his kidneys again and therefore entered dialysis.

However, the treatment was disrupting the patient’s work routine and he later decided to undergo a new transplant. According to the Daily Mail’s report, the surgery was performed in April last year at Hammersmith Hospital, one of Europe’s largest kidney transplant centers.

Initial tests and evaluation in August 2021 showed that the transplant was going well. But the 49-year-old worker began to feel pain. A new round of evaluations found that the patient had a one-centimeter tumor that doctors initially thought was just a cyst.

As early as December, the medical team found that the cyst is actually a highly aggressive form of cancer that directly affects the donated organ. At that time, the tumor was already seven centimeters long. Despite deciding to have the organ removed by transplant, the patient died in March of this year as doctors failed to detect that the cancer had spread to his spine.

A forensic officer heard by the investigation said this is rare. “This death resulted from a known but very rare complication of a planned transplant,” said Dr Lydia Brown. According to the newspaper, among more than 80,000 transplants per year, Sidhu’s case was one of 11 cases recorded in the world.

Sidhu’s widow said she was angry. “‘My husband trusted his doctors so much. How could they not see the problem,'” Tarjinder, 47, told the Daily Mail. “It’s really hard for me and our kids right now. I think about him all the time,” she says.

Doctors say “there was nothing to worry about”

Doctors responsible for Sidhu’s transplant said there was no reason to doubt the integrity of the donated kidney, as the donor had no history or symptoms of cancer.

“Even looking back, we couldn’t find any reason why this transplant wouldn’t happen. We took all the factors we knew into account and there was no cause for concern,” said Frank Dor, Assistant Transplant Consultant. Surgeon at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, an academic health center affiliated with the UK health system.

The tests revealed that the cancer was not lymphoma, which is the abnormal, accelerated growth of an unhealthy cell. This disease occurs in about 2% of kidney transplants, as immunosuppressive drugs prevent the body from fighting cell mutations. In fact, doctors discovered that the transplanted organ itself had cancer.

The hypothesis is that the cancer may be at such an early stage that it is not possible to identify visual or clinical signs that would indicate problems in the kidney – obtained through mandatory testing conducted by the NHS transplant sector. Also, given that the donor died from a head injury, the doctors were unaware that he also had cancer.