Infections are common in kidney allograft recipients and according the time of onset show different epidemiology. In the first post-transplant period the severity of infections is related to both pathogen characteristics and the intense immunosuppression [1].
During the last years the necessity to expand the donor pool led to an increase of DCD utilization. This kind of transplants assure good outcomes in terms of graft function, except for a higher incidence of DGF and infective complications and lower patient survival [7, 8]. However, there is only partial evidence that post-transplant infection risk could be higher in DCD kidney transplants compared to the DBD ones [4, 8, 9]. In order to reduce complications related to longer warm and cold ischemia times, the DCD donor management is very complex and must be fast, due to the need of maintaining circulation during organ retrieval and of pre-implantation machine perfusion of organs [6, 8]. All of these steps represent possible contamination sources, that add to the already known potential infectious risk of the donor [10].
Infectious arteritis is a rare condition, presenting in patients immunocompromised or subject to invasive procedures. In the context of renal transplantation there are reports of graft artery aneurisms that presented at different post-transplant times, with variable clinical presentation, i.e. hypertension or declining renal function, and with the US evidence of pseudoaneurysm. In most cases the pathogen was a fungus already isolated from blood cultures of the recipient [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]. A study on a large number of donors, examining closely the possible source of infection, has demonstrated that patients who received a kidney with positive Candida spp. isolates from the donor, eventually developed candidiasis [19]. However, there are reported cases in which a known Candida spp. contamination in the donor did not exert any disease in the recipient [15].
In our patient the source of infection was difficult to define. In fact, we excluded contamination of the kidney perfusate since cultures resulted negative, and from donor’s blood cultures only a multi-sensitive Escherichia coli was isolated. Besides, in our patient the presence of an arterial pseudoaneurysm or aneurism was not detected by routine ultrasounds that we perform every other day. Moreover, the surveillance blood cultures we performed because of the donor Escherichia coli blood positivity resulted persistently negative.
Overall our patient presented with an unusual and insidious clinical picture as sometimes candidiasis does [2, 20]. In fact, we dealt with a severe disease that appeared suddenly without any of the typical signs of infection from Candida spp. or gram-negative E.coli ESBL or with local evidence of disease, i.e. US evidence of aneurism or collection.
Considering the potentially fatal outcome of arterial rupture due to infective arteritis with an atypical presentation, as in our case, this diagnostic hypothesis - in the setting of a donor and a graft that underwent invasive procedures - should be always considered. Of course, any attempt to identify a possible transmission from the donor must be achieved, even considering the potential low sensitivity and false negative results of cultures for fungi.
As a standard of care cultures of all organ preservation solutions and of donor’s blood and urine should be performed. Moreover, surveillance cultures of recipient’s blood, urine and drainage fluid of kidney surgical site should be carried out in presence of early symptoms of an active infection, in order to begin a targeted antimicrobial therapy as soon as possible.
Therefore anti-fungal prophylaxis should be taken in account in patients at high risk of invasive fungal infections, although it is difficult to determine which patients belong to this category [19].
Antifungal prophylaxis may be proposed to patients with risk factors, i.e., when preservation solution is positive for hyphae, when donor is colonized or when the recipient undergoes induction with thymoglobulin. Prophylaxis may be started just before transplantation on day 0 and antifungal prophylaxis using an echinocandin could be considered, although the data to support the use of a specific antifungal drug or the duration of the prophylaxis are currently scarce. Moreover, a prophylaxis of fungal infections, which have a low incidence rate, could expose the patient to resistance phenomena and potentially worsen the clinical picture [2, 10]. Certainly the best strategy is to stratify patients according to their risk.
On the other hand, the case of our patient shed light on the potential risk of fungal or E.coli ESBL infections using DCD managed with ECMO and ex-vivo perfusion [10, 21, 22]. In this setting an antifungal prophylaxis may be suggested, even if cultures from donor’s blood and from preservation fluids result negative.
Of course, a periodic US surveillance of graft anastomoses might be a valid strategy to prevent vascular complications, at least in cases where candidemia or sepsis hesitate in the formation of an arterial pseudoaneurysm or aneurism. In such cases, a strategy with either surgery or endovascular approach using covered stent can be planned and used as an effective method to prevent or stop bleeding, subsequently preserving the graft and patient survival.
In our case, even a prompt CT scan had not led to a definitive immediate diagnosis. In fact, only the revision of the first CT showed a minimal leakage in the arterial phase, that was probably due to a progressive rupture of the renal artery (Fig. 1c). At that time point a potential treatment with covered arterial stent or surgery with the replacement of the anastomosis could be considered [13, 14, 23].
The timing of diagnosis and surgical treatment is crucial to save the graft and the patient, but the surgical repair of the artery even with an autologous graft remains difficult to apply in an emergency setting.
Arteritis is a rare post-kidney transplant complication, but once occurred, is associated with high mortality and graft loss rate. The serious sequelae of these infections, mostly related to candidiasis, require an active post-transplant surveillance program in order to undertake a prompt targeted anti-infective prophylaxis or therapy. It is essential to repeatedly evaluate the patient with infectious disease specialists and to discuss the onset of each antimicrobial therapy after multidisciplinary meetings and discussions. In patients at high risk of infections, such as DCD recipients, an antifungal prophylaxis may be advocated. On the other hand, we need to consider that the application of ECMO and ex-situ organ perfusion in the setting of DCDs in Italy (which by law require 20 min of no touch period to declare circulatory death) is a novel clinical field with a low number of cases performed; for such reasons we do not know yet the actual rate of infection related to these procedure.
To date there is no evidence in literature, we can say that prophylaxis can be risky for everyone.
