Heart Recipient Also Got Cancer--Report

Doctors reported that a 58-year-old man given a heart transplant got something unexpected from the donated organ--prostate cancer. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia said the patient received the heart from a 53-year-old man. As the heart transplant was underway, doctors planning to harvest the man’s other organs discovered cancer cells in pelvic lymph nodes. “The clinical scenario dictated that the . . . heart transplantation be completed,” said the report, published in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. A biopsy later found a tumor on one of the man’s ribs of the type caused by spreading prostate cancer