Infection among renal transplant patients in the Kingdom of Bahrain: A ten year retrospective study ( 2004-2014)

Introduction:  Kidney transplantation is the process of transplanting the organ to a patient with end stage renal disease. Complications with transplant can be encountered during or for a varying period post operatively. As graft survival and immunosuppressant regimens have improved, infection of grafts have become a leading concern. The diagnosis of infection in such patients is challenging too due to the lack of the typical infection indicators like fever as the patients are immunocompromised. The focus of our study is to study the extent of infection on the transplanted patients. The research will look into the type of microorganisms encountered, their management and outcome. Methods  & Materials: A retrospective study was carried out between the periods of 1st of January 2004 to 31st of December of the same year 2014. All renal transplant patients admitted during this period were segregated according to the reason of admission. Only those with impression of infection were enrolled.   Results: A total of 108 patients admitted between the period of 1st of January 2004 and 31st of December 2014 with impression of infection post renal transplant. Some of the patients had recurrent history during those ten years for infectious purposes. From the 108 patients, 74 of them received transplant from living donors (68.52%). The diagnosis on admission was limited to certain differentials. 35.19% patients were admitted with the impression of urinary tract infection. Pneumonia was diagnosed in 10.19%.  patients.  Majority of patient (89.96%) were on maintenance dose of steroids. That was followed by MMF, Tacrolimus and cyclosporine with a percentage of 81.48%, 46.3% and 25.93% respectively. Regarding the antibiotics, 86.11% of the admitted patient were started on single antibiotic on admission including those with recurrent admission. Conclusion: Fever is a common presenting symptom in our population of transplant recipients which reflects the possibility of infection. The majority responded to a single antibiotic use.  The limitation of our study is the small number of the transplanted patients. &nbsp