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Graft-versus-host disease
Make it clearer
Graft-versus-host disease turns a transplant upside down. The graft is the donated tissue; the host is the person who receives it. Here the defense cells that came along inside the donated tissue look around, do not recognize the new body and attack it. It is not the body rejecting what it received: it is what was received rejecting the body.
What lets them tell self from foreign are the histocompatibility genes. Those genes make identification proteins, the major histocompatibility complex, which work like an ID badge that every cell wears. The recipient's badges are not the ones the donor knows, and so the donor's cytotoxic CD8 T cells, the white blood cells trained to kill marked cells, multiply and damage the organs.
It is a common complication of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, that is, a transplant of the blood-making cells that come from another person. It is divided into two forms by when it appears: acute within one hundred days of the transplant, chronic after that.
In brief
Graft-versus-host disease happens when immune cells in the transplanted tissue read the recipient as foreign and attack.
It is not the body rejecting what it received: it is what was received rejecting the body.
Recognition depends on the histocompatibility genes, which encode the major histocompatibility complex proteins; the donor's cytotoxic CD8 T cells proliferate and damage organs.
It is a common complication of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, and it is split into acute and chronic forms by onset before or after one hundred days.
Sources (1)
- National Center for Biotechnology Information, StatPearls PublishingGraft-Versus-Host Disease, StatPearlsPublished
This page explains the topic in general terms; it does not tell anyone what treatment to follow.
Updated