A friend of my mom's is coming up on 35 years since her liver transplant, and I think that's given me an unrealistic idea of how successful they are—I guess there's a 1 in 10 chance the new liver just doesn't work at all
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One of the really cool things about liver transplants is that even if they don't work longterm, sometimes they buy enough time for the liver to regrow, because livers do that, just, yknow, too slowly for that to be relevant when you're in liver failure
But yeah, the spread on transplanted organ duration is pretty wide! Very, very rarely people even develop immune tolerance, where their immune system figures out that the organ isn't a threat and stops responding to it as a threat, even without immunosuppression. Usually discovered accidentally.
Emphasis on the 'very rare': if anyone reading this has a transplanted organ, do Not give it a try, the overwhelming odds are that it won't go well. Researchers are trying to find signatures that might indicate that this could be the case, in order to better tailor treatment with lower risks.
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