Although innate immunity is crucial to pulmonary host defense and can initiate immune and inflammatory responses independent of adaptive immunity, it remains unstudied in the context of transplant rejection. To investigate the role of innate immunity in the development of allograft rejection, we assessed the impact of two functional polymorphisms in the toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) associated wi...

The incidence of acute humoral rejection (AHR) in renal allograft biopsies has been difficult to determine because widely accepted diagnostic criteria have not been established. C4d deposition in peritubular capillaries (PTC) of renal allografts has been proposed as a useful marker for AHR. This study was designed to test the relative value of C4d staining, histology, and serology in the diagno...

BACKGROUND It remains disputed whether cardiac retransplantation should be performed. This study aimed to evaluate our long-term experiences on cardiac retransplantation in adults. PATIENTS AND METHODS Between March 1989 and December 2004, 2% (28/1290) of cardiac retransplantations were performed. RESULTS The reasons for cardiac retransplantation were cardiac allograft vasculopathy (n=13; 4...

BACKGROUND There is evidence that biopsy of stable renal allografts may be of value in predicting chronic allograft nephropathy, the main cause of graft loss. However, the reproducibility of such histological evaluation has not been tested in this setting. We tested the reproducibility of the Banff schema for this purpose. METHODS We rated acute and chronic changes in 184 protocol biopsies. I...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES The impact of posttransplantation anemia on patient survival, renal allograft survival, and rate of acute rejection is not known. DESIGN, SETTING, PARTICIPANTS, & MEASUREMENTS A total of 1023 patients who underwent kidney transplantation at one center from January 1992 through June 2003 were retrospectively analyzed. Posttransplantation anemia was defined as mean hem...

BACKGROUND Heart transplant rejection originates slow and fragmented conduction. Signal-averaged ECG (SAECG) is a stratification method in the risk of rejection. OBJECTIVE To develop a risk score for rejection, using SAECG variables. METHODS We studied 28 transplant patients. First, we divided the sample into two groups based on the occurrence of acute rejection (5 with rejection and 23 wit...

BACKGROUND Historically, the acute rejection rates in simultaneous pancreas-kidney (SPK) recipients have been extremely high (50-80%), with many second and third rejection episodes despite the use of quadruple immunosuppression (antibody induction and cyclosporine [CsA]-azathioprine [AZA]-based maintenance immunosuppression). Although this acute rejection has rarely led to graft loss, it has be...

We appreciate Dr. Brennan and colleagues’ novel observation that shedding of urinary tract JC polyomavirus (JCV) associates with reduced rates of acute renal allograft rejection.1 Bacterial urinary tract infections trigger acute rejection and non-JC viral infections may do the same. This finding further supports protective effects of urinary tract JCV on CKD and APOL1 gene-JCV interactions redu...

The use of chemokine antagonism as a strategy to inhibit leukocyte trafficking into inflammatory sites requires identification of the dominant chemokines mediating recruitment. The chemokine(s) directing T cells into cardiac allografts during acute rejection remain(s) unidentified. The role of the CXC chemokines IFN-gamma inducible protein 10 (IP-10) and monokine induced by IFN-gamma (Mig) in a...