The nurse is caring for a patient waiting for a heart transplant. The patient's spouse asks the nurse, "Why don't they just choose any heart until the right heart can be found?" What is the nurse's best response?
A) The more closely the new heart matches the patient's tissue, the less aggressive the immune reaction will be.
B) When the body responds to specific self-antigens to produce antibodies against its own cells, a severe immune response results.
C) Graft-versus-host disease would result making the patient very ill.
D) The patient would need to have suppressor T cells infused daily to maintain the heart.
A
Feedback:
Transplantation of foreign tissue (e.g., moving a heart from a donor to a sick patient) results in an immune reaction. Matching a donor's human leukocyte antigen markers is important as closely as possible to those of the recipient because histocompatability is essential. The more closely the transplanted heart matches the recipient, the less aggressive the immune response will be to the donated tissue. Graft-versus-host disease occurs only in stem cell or bone marrow donations, not organ transplantation. Suppressor T cells cannot be transfused like blood because they must be produced by the body to function appropriately.
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