Organ Transplantation: What It Involves

An organ transplant may be needed when one of your organs fails, through illness or injury. Doctors remove an organ from another person, a living donor or one who has died, and place it in your body.

Organs that can be transplanted include the:

• heart
• intestine
• kidney
• liver
• lung
• pancreas

Waiting, matching and rejection

The wait for a new organ is often long. Doctors must match each donor to a recipient, which lowers the risk of rejection: the recipient's own immune system attacking the new organ. Anyone who has an organ transplant must then take medicines for the rest of their life to help keep the body from rejecting the new organ.

Sources

• MedlinePlus, U.S. National Library of Medicine, "Organ Transplantation." https://medlineplus.gov/organtransplantation.html
• Rewritten in hubnx's own words.