SYDNEY (AFP) – An Australian girl spontaneously switched blood groups and adopted her donor’s immune system following a liver transplant in the first known case of its type, doctors treating her said Thursday.
Demi-Lee Brennan was aged nine and seriously ill with liver failure when she received the transplant, doctors at a top Sydney children’s hospital told AFP.
Nine months later it was discovered that she had changed blood types and her immune system had switched over to that of the donor after stem cells from the new liver migrated to her bone marrow.
She is now a healthy 15-year-old, Michael Stormon, a hepatologist treating her, told AFP. Stormon said he had given several presentations on the case around the world and had heard of none like it.
In related news, Dracula isn’t picky about blood type.
My husband had a bone marrow transplant in 2003 at Baylor Hospital in Dallas after learning he had AML (leukemia). The unrelated donor matched 11 of 12 markers…the mismatch was blood type. He was A+ , now he is B+. And five years later he is amazingly healthy. Miracle indeed.