Melanoma Survivors Should Not be Organ Donors

A new report has found that people with an invasive melanoma even if successfully treated, should never be organ donors.

UK Physicians reached this conclusion after treating two people who developed melanoma after receiving a kidney transplant. Both patients had received a kidney from the same donor.

The donor had undergone surgery to treat the melanoma and was cancer-free when she died of a brain hemorrhage 16 years after the operation.

One of the recipient donors has died after developing a melanoma in her breast and kidney a year after the transplant. The melanoma had not first developed on the skin, so it was not the patient’s own.

The other transplant recipient developed a melanoma over his transplanted kidney two years after the transplant. Again, the melanoma did not first develop on the skin. The transplanted kidney and tumour were surgically removed. Two years after diagnosis with the melanoma, the man is still alive and well.

Previous research found that melanoma developed in organ recipients six months to eight years after the donor had surgery to remove the melanoma.

Melanoma is the rarest but most aggressive form of skin cancer. It can be treated if caught early enough but fatal if it spreads from the skin to other parts of the body.

The authors of the study concluded that no patient with invasive melanoma should ever be an organ donor.

(Source: New England Journal of Medicine 2003; 348:567-568)