Can a successfully transplanted organ be donated again if the recipient dies?

Yes, but it’s very rare. And also, the first transplant recepient would have to die quickly (probably within weeks), otherwise the organ went through too much trauma (physical due to surgery, and biological due to host immune defences and the fact the host died) to be of use for another transplantation.

Here’s what I found:

Yes the organ can be used.

Even rejected organ can be used to another person.

I will give an example.

I was a member of commitee which was dealing with organ transplantation in my state.

There was a case where the wife had renal failure needing kidney to survive.

Husband came forward to donate his kidney ,after all the tests the hospital decided to transplant kidney from husband to wife.

Accordingly one kidney was removed from husband and transplanted to the wife.

During surgery , during harvesting that is when taking out the kidney from the husband there was excessive bleeding the patient went into shock ,

Due to shock the only kidney which was available in the donar husband failed that means he had lost one kidney by donation and the other kidney failed due to hypovolumic shock

Mean time the transplanted kidney to the wife got rejected.

The nephrologist became panicky and was in tears .

He reported the matter to me and was in great shock Wanted my opinion over phone since I was in another city attending conferance I told him the best thing is to put back the rejected kidney from the wife to the husband , since there was no other choice .

As per my advice surgery was done and the rejected kidney was put back to the husband.

After the surgery the doctor called me and said he was not hopeful of good result since the rejected kidney was hard like tennis ball , I told him not to bother,

After the surgery the rejected retransplanted kidney started functioning sufficient to take care of his life.the other kidney yet to function.

Rejected kidney was retransplanted ,May be for the first time in India.

This I came to know when I presented the case in a forum of urologist they could not belive such thing is possible.

I am not a surgeon how could I recommend for a thing which was not heard of in India.

I gained the knowledge from a case which was presented to me for consultations by a lawyer about a year back before this case of rejected retransplantation

I am a medicolegal consultant based at Bangalore . One day a young lady lawyer came to me for consultations and placed her case to me.

Her cliant was a middle aged lady who had filed the case that she had donated her kidney to her husband which was rejected , the hospital removed the kidney from the husband and send the rejected kidney to the pathology department for academic purpose.

The lady was telling that the kidney was fine when it was in her and got rejected when transplanted to her husband why did the surgeon not put back the kidney to her. It was a very innocent argument.

When the lawyer asked me wether she can take up the case , I requested her few days time ,

I went through all the literature, and came to know that in US they have successfully retransplanted rejected kiddies even successfully transplanted to third parties

With this knowledge I told the lawyer to go ahead and file a case and she fought the case successfully and got compensation of 10 lakhs from the corporate hospital.

Based on this knowledge which I gained I recommended boldly for retransplant of rejected kidney, And it was a success story.

One thing I learned is knowledge is very important and by trying you are not going to loose any thing.

This happened just four years back , and I am happy I was the one who initiated may be first time in the country at that time.

Source here

I saw a post where surgeons saved a severed hand by attaching it to the patient’s leg in the lower calf area. They connected the blood vessels which kept the tissue alive until they were ready to reattach the hand to the wrist. If they can do that, I would be willing to bet they can retransplant an organ with some success.

Theoretically yes, but actually in the real world, probably not.

When you take an organ out of one person and put it into another, it’s not getting any blood. So if it’s a heart, the entire heart is having a heart attack until it gets hooked back up in the new person. There are ways to slow this process down, but still, the organ takes a pretty big hit. Some organs (like the liver) can regenerate themselves, so it’s not as big a deal. But the heart, for instance, can’t. Currently, a sizable percentage of all transplanted organs fail because they’re out of the body too long.

Then, once the organ is transplanted, the new body is like “this isn’t mine. It has to die” and starts attacking it. That’s why you have to be on immunosuppressant meds when you have a transplant. They work pretty well, but the organ still takes a hit, and the longer it’s in the body, the more the new body can slowly attack it.

If everything went perfectly (you take the heart from one person, turn around, and plop it directly into the new body) and the immunosuppression was perfect, then yeah, you could definitely do it.

In reality, there can be hours between harvesting and implantation. Then there is some tweaking with the immunosuppression. The chances of a single organ tolerating all this jerking around TWICE is pretty low.

Random organ trivia, since it happens to apply to me personally;

If you have a kidney removed as an infant, the remaining kidney will grow to make up for it.

I just think that’s awesome! The human body is amazing with what it can adapt to.