Cytomegalovirus infection in lung transplantation; current status, detection, prophylactic treatment

The control of the postoperative infectious disease is one of the important elements in transplantation. Among them, the control of the cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection may be said the most important in the management of the transplant recipient who is under the immunosuppression. This time, we review the status of the pre-transplant CMV infection in the donors and recipients of both brain-death and living-related lung transplantation that we performed, and report our prophylactic treatment for CMV infection and its results. The CMV positive rate of the recipients and donors of the lung transplantation that we experienced in Okayama University was 87%. We experienced 4 cases that developed CMV infection after lung transplantation. However, there is no case that died of a CMV-related infectious disease after lung transplantation to date. By the CMV mismatch transplant, it seemed that the frequency of the postoperative CMV disease was high in comparison with the transplant of recipient CMV (+). But, the control of the CMV infection after lung transplantation is thought to be possible if we give a proper prophylactic treatment even in CMV mismatch transplantation.