Autografts involve transplanting tissue from one part of the body to another, while allografts, isografts, and xenografts use tissue from other donors. Autografts are often safer and heal faster, but can create discomfort and longer hospital stays. Skin, bone, and blood vessel autografts are common, while allografts are often used for bone grafts. Blood vessel autografts are used in bypass surgery.
An autograft is tissue that is transplanted from one part of the body to another part of the same body. This is also known as an autograft, which means that the tissue donor and tissue recipient are the same. Grafting is a surgical procedure in which tissue or an organ is transplanted or attached to a damaged, missing, or defective part of the body. If the graft goes well, the transplanted tissue integrates with the body and is served by the recipient’s blood supply.
Although people usually think of skin grafting, different types of tissue can be grafted, including bone, nerves, tendons, blood vessels, and eye materials. In addition to the autograft, a patient may receive an allograft, isograft, or xenograft. An allograft uses tissue transplanted from a donor of one species to another body of the same species, such as in bone from one human to another human. An isograft uses tissue from a genetically identical donor, such as a monzygotic twin. In a xenograft, the donor and recipient are from different species, like pig cartilage donated to a human.
An autograft typically deals with skin, bone, and blood vessel transplants. Using tissue from your own body is often safer and heals faster than grafts from another donor. In emergency situations, an autograft is recommended whenever possible because the patient does not have to undergo screening to ensure that the donor tissue is compatible. Because this procedure removes tissue from one part of the body to attach it to another location, autografts create two sites of retrieval, which can lengthen hospital stays and increase patient discomfort.
During a skin graft, skin tissue is usually removed from a less visible part of the body, such as the inner thighs or buttocks. Skin grafts are used to shorten a patient’s healing time, if a substantial portion of the skin is missing or damaged, and to improve the patient’s appearance by minimizing scarring or deformity. Usually, only a thin layer of skin is removed from the donor site and grafted into the recipient site, but sometimes thicker layers will be used. Thicker grafts carry a higher risk of complications, but create less scarring on the recipient part of the body.
Bone grafts take bone from a donor site and fill gaps in broken, chipped or deformed bones. Physicians often use an allograft, typically from frozen dead bone, instead of an autograft into bone graft due to the high risk of morbidity at the donor sites. Autografts, however, are useful for eliciting a healing response from the recipient bone, thereby enhancing recovery.
In bypass surgery, a blood vessel autograft is usually used to replace a section of a vital artery. For example, in bypass surgery, doctors graft veins or arteries from elsewhere in the body to replace blocked sections of important arteries, such as the coronary artery. The donor vessels often come from the leg or the inner chest wall.
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