A patient who received a liver in 1999 as part of a "domino" transplant involving three living patients has shown symptoms of a disease believed to have been caused by the organ, a Kumamoto University professor has said.

It is the first time in Japan that a liver transplant recipient has been confirmed to have developed the incurable metabolic disorder familial amyloid polyneuropathy, or FAP.

The case counters earlier views that it would take about 20 years for symptoms of the progressive disease to occur in recipients after part of the liver of an FAP patient is transplanted, as most FAP patients experience the symptoms for the first time in their 20s or 30s.

FAP is a disease associated with protein abnormalities that cause peripheral nerve damage, among other things.

Yukio Ando, a professor at the university, said Wednesday the patient who came down with FAP, is a woman in her 50s who was suffering from primary biliary cirrhosis and received part of the liver of a man suffering FAP in July 1999.