Staying Healthy With Your New Transplant

Preventing Rejection

Once you have received your organ, you should need to do everything possible to stay healthy and prevent rejection. While the risk of rejecting your new organ decreases as time goes on, it never goes away. Learn more *

What Is Rejection?

Rejection is the process by which the organ recipient's immune system recognizes, becomes sensitized against and attempts to eliminate the foreign antigens of the donor organ. It often occurs when your immune system detects things like bacteria or a virus. Some degree of rejection occurs with every transplant, but how clinically significant the rejection is very individual.

Although acute rejection, the body's attempt to destroy the transplanted organ, is possible years after a transplant, at least one episode is common within the first year after a transplant. Despite the use of immunosuppression therapy, acute rejection can occur and often lead chronic rejection. Chronic rejection, which is characterized by gradual loss of organ function, is an ongoing concern for transplant recipients because it can occur weeks, months or years after transplantation. Therefore, organ recipients should be aware of the signs of both acute and chronic rejection. Call your doctor as soon as you experience any of them. Symptoms include:

  • Pain or tenderness over the transplant site
  • Fever
  • Flu-like symptoms such as chills, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, tiredness, headache, dizziness and body aches and pains
  • Change in pulse rate
  • Weight gain
  • Swelling
  • Less urine

Anti-Rejection Medication

The goal of anti-rejection medicines, also called immunosuppressants, is to adequately suppress the immune response to prevent rejection of the transplanted organ while maintaining sufficient immunity to prevent overwhelming infection. Many of the medications used to achieve immunosuppression have adverse effects of their own. That's why a combination of medications that work in different phases of the immune response minimize side effects and produce effective immunosuppression. Clinical immunosuppression usually occurs in three phases: induction, maintenance and anti-rejection.


Was this information helpful? E-mail us with feedback or questions.




This web site is intended solely for the purpose of electronically providing the public with general health-related information and convenient access to the data resources. UNOS is not affiliated with any one product nor does UNOS assume responsibility for any error, omissions or other discrepancies.