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Clinical Microbiology Reviews, Apr 1997, 277-297, Vol 10, No. 2
MT LaRocco and SJ Burgert
Over the past quarter century, tremendous technological advances have been
made in bone marrow and solid organ transplantation. Despite these
advances, an enduring problem for the transplant recipient is infection. As
immunosuppressive regimens have become more systematic, it is apparent that
different pathogens affect the transplant recipient at different time
points in the posttransplantation course, since they are influenced by
multiple intrinsic and extrinsic factors. An understanding of this evolving
risk for infection is essential to the management of the patient following
transplantation and is a key to the early diagnosis and treatment of
infection. Likewise, diagnosis of infection is dependent upon the quality
of laboratory support, and services provided by the clinical microbiology
laboratory play an important role in all phases of clinical
transplantation. These include the prescreening of donors and recipients
for evidence of active or latent infection, the timely and accurate
microbiologic evaluation of the transplant patient with suspected
infection, and the surveillance of asymptomatic allograft recipients for
infection. Expert services in bacteriology, mycology, parasitology,
virology, and serology are needed and communication between the laboratory
and the transplantation team is paramount for providing clinically
relevant, cost-effective diagnostic testing.
Copyright © 1997 by the American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.
Infection in the bone marrow transplant recipient and role of the microbiology laboratory in clinical transplantation
Department of Pathology, St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital, Houston, TX 77225-0269, USA.
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