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Three of the patients died of cancer, highlighting "the often fatal consequences of donor-derived breast cancer," the researchers wrote in a study published in the American Journal of Transplantation.
According to researchers in the Netherlands and Germany, a 53-year-old organ donor died of a stroke in 2007.
She was suffering from no medical problems that would have prevented organ donation, and many tests revealed no signs of cancer, reports "Live Science."
Doctors transplanted the kidneys, lungs, liver and heart into five separate donors. The transplanted patient died of unrelated causes shortly after transplantation.
However, the three patients who received a lung, liver and left kidney transplant succumbed to cancer in the next six years.
A DNA analysis of their cancer cells revealed that they came from the donor organs.
A 32-year-old man who received the right kidney was also diagnosed with breast cancer cells in his transplanted kidney in 2011.
However, the doctors managed to remove the kidney, and he also underwent chemotherapy. The treatment was successful and the man was free from cancer 10 years after the transplant surgery.
Getting cancer through organ transplantation is "a very, very rare event," said Lewis Teperman, director of organ transplantation at Northwell Health in the United States, who was not involved in the case.
According to the report, transplant recipients have a chance to be between one in 10,000 and five out of 10,000.
The report concludes that the low rate of cancer transmission through transplantation "implies that current cancer screening practices by donors are effective".
The researchers wrote that if cancer passes from donor to recipient, physicians should consider removing grafts from all other patients who have received organs from this donor.
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