Heart Transplant Patients at Severe Risk of Getting various Forms of Skin Cancer
This is in accordance with recent research made available in the American Journal of Transplantation. The Journal went on to say that heart transplant patients also had a high likelihood of melanoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma development.
Patients that have undergone heart transplants often take medication in order to prevent their bodies from attacking the transplanted heart as a foreign organism. This medication causes changes in the transplant patients immune systems, this makes them much more likely to develop cancers as a result of their now impaired immune system.
A study was led by a medical doctor from Northwestern University, Murad Alam. In this study, researchers spent time studying patient records dating back ten years of six thousand two hundred and seventy one heart transplant patients that had their operations done at thirty two different American transplant centres.
The findings of this study indicate that when observing the trends in the wellbeing of these patients following their heart transplants, the patients had a higher likelihood of developing skin cancers when compared with data from other transplant patients that had not received heart transplants.
Alam said that the improvement of patient teaching and an increase in the detection and screening of cancers among heart transplant patients might lead to a reduction in the patients chances of getting life threatening cancer and this would thus reduce their mortality rate.