Transplant recipients at risk for 32 kinds of cancer

As if it’s not stressful enough to wait, receive, recover and pay for an organ transplant these days, the National Institutes of Health reported this disturbing news yesterday:

Organ transplant recipients in the United States have a high risk of developing 32 different types of cancer, according to a new study of transplant recipients which fully describes the range of malignancies that occur. Researchers from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, the Health Resources and Services Administration, and their colleagues evaluated medical data from more than 175,700 transplant recipients, accounting for about 40 percent of all organ transplant recipients in the country. The results of this study appeared in the Nov. 2, 2011, issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.