Early Diagnosis of Cancer in Renal Transplant Patients: A Single Center Experience

Renal transplantation confers increased survival with improvement of immune suppressive drugs, but certaintypes of neoplasm can arise as secondary complications. It is thus well known that recipients have significantlyincreased risk of developing de novo malignancy when compared with the age-matched general population. Canceris the 4th most common cause of death in transplant patients after cardiovascular disease, infections and liver failure.Our transplantation team has performed 1,582 kidney transplantations since 1975. Fifty-nine of the patients developedmalignancies in the posttransplantation period. The most common was Kaposi’s sarcoma (19 patients, 32.2 %),followed by lymphomas (16 patients, 27.1 %) and skin carcinomas (13 patients, 22.0 %). Many factors can contributeto high susceptibility in these patients; age at transplantation, certain types of viral infections like Epstein-Barrvirus, human herpes virus-8, human papilloma virus or chronic usage of immune suppressive agents, type of immunesuppressive drugs, and ethnic characteristics . Transplant recipients generally have advanced stage cancers at thetime of diagnosis with a poor prognosis. Since some neoplasms are common early detection of cancer is important todecrease cancer related mortality and morbidity. This article considers risk factors and recommendations for earlydiagnosis of cancer in renal transplant patients.