Immunosuppressants?

Question

If a person had an organ transplant how long would they survive assuming they stopped taking their immunosuppressants?

Weeks, months, years?

Thanks Vinay, that is a good answer especially the part about liver transplant recipients becoming tollerant.

I am a renal tx patient (sept 94) and have not taken any immunosuppressants since 1996.
I'm healthy. My creatinine? level has never been above 105, my weight and general health has improved and.....I can eat what I want now.....no potassium diets etc.

I'm not suggesting that if you're a transplant recipient you should stop taking your medicine.

Answer 1

It depends on the organ transplanted.
Heart: a few days to a week or two
Kidneys: Losing a transplanted kidney would not kill you if you had access to dialysis. Without dialysis renal failure would take a few weeks to kill you.
Lungs: a few days to a week
Pancreas: you would be diabetic again within a week but it would not kill you if you resumed taking insulin
Small Bowel: you would lose the graft in a week or two. Need emergency surgery for bleeding or obstruction of the gut and be dependent on total parenteral nutrition but none of that would necessarily kill you.
Liver: about a month. Curiously though some liver transplant recipients become tolerant and do not reject their livers even if they stop taking immunosuppression. This is rare though.

Answer 2

As the "transplant surgeon" suggests, it depends on which organ you're talking about. However, there is a clear lack of understanding of the transplantation procedure.
Bone Marrow: No needed for life, so it depends on the stage at which you stop. Early in the transplant, can lead to severe graft-versus-host disease and put you in trouble. Missing one or two doses is not a big problem, though.
Kidney, liver, heart: In all cases, and assuming a good engraftment has occurred, the cellular response mobilised by stopping the immunosuppressant, takes a good 14 days to start. As long as you don't cross the fatidic frontier of 21 days, drugs could still reciver your initial position.
Now, 21 days is to start with chronic inflammation. You can survive for longer, of course.
Also, all organs can be definitively accepted. ALL ORGANS.
...in primates. Exceptional cases are reported in the literature, but We don't gamble with that.

Answer 3

Weeks..
Depending on the time the transplant has been alredy there......4-6 weeks is fair to say (stopping azathioprine, immuran, prednisone etc)..............

Answer 4

I reckon weeks or even days.