Infections in Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant Recipients

A. Safdar (ed.), Principles and Practice of Cancer Infectious Diseases, Current Clinical Oncology, DOI 10.1007/978-1-60761-644-3_2, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract The risk of infection among allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant (aHSCT) recipients is determined by patient age, underlying disease, the complications that occurred during preceding treatment regimens, the selected transplantation modality, and the severity of graft-versus-host disease. Immunological reconstitution after hematopoietic recovery has an impact on the type of posttransplant infectious complications, and infectionrelated mortality is significantly higher postengraftment than during the short posttransplant neutropenia. As different pathogenetic and epidemiological backgrounds of infections occur following aHSCT, three consecutive time periods posttransplant are separately described: the early posttransplant period (preengraftment, comprising 3 weeks), the intermediate posttransplant period (3 weeks to 3 months), and the late posttransplant period (later than day + 90).