Immunosuppression and Malignant Neoplasms

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Abstract
To the Editor: Simmons and his associates (New Eng J Med 283:190–191, 1970) have taken a position against the discontinuance or lightening of immunosuppressive therapy in organ-homograft recipients in whom de novo cancers have developed. Their argument is based almost entirely on observations of a patient who actually did stop steroid therapy toward the end of her life, who then displayed evidence of recovered immunological reactivity by promptly rejecting her renal homograft, which had hitherto been functioning for four years, and who died 16 months after the diagnosis of disseminated dysgerminoma had been made. At autopsy, residual tumor could not . . .