Toxoplasma gondii and heart transplant recipients
Posted by ajcann on November 20, 2007
A quarter of the world population is infected with Toxoplasma gondii, a long-lived and common brain parasite. The normal host for this organism is the domestic cat, so maybe its not so surprising that human infections are also common. New research points to the potential impact of this normally slient pathogen:
Abstract: Chronic Toxoplasma gondii infection is known to trigger potentially adverse immunoregulatory changes, but the long-term implication for heart transplant recipients has not been assessed previously. We evaluated the risk of mortality, development of cardiac allograft vasculopathy (CAV), and acute cellular rejection among T. gondii-seropositive heart transplant (HTx) recipients and the 4 donor/recipient seropairing groups. Frozen pre-HTx serum samples of 288 recipients and 246 donors were evaluated for T. gondii serostatus. Patients had undergone prospective serotesting using alternative assays, and results determined by the 2 methods were compared. Overall, 211 recipients (73%) were seronegative and 77 (27%) were seropositive. In total, 82 recipients died, 76 developed CAV, and 82 had 1 or more episode of treated cellular rejection. Recipient seropositivity was associated with a significantly higher risk of mortality and CAV. Seropositivity did not influence the number of rejection episodes, and donor/recipient seropairing was not a risk factor for any end point.
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November 21, 2007 at 8:04 pm
Toxoplasmosis is a peculiar disease in the sense that it is spread by cat urine and even rats avoid those areas, courtesy their olfactory sense. It thus may even have played a role in evolution.