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Review
. 2020 Oct 14;26(38):5797-5811.
doi: 10.3748/wjg.v26.i38.5797.

Gastrointestinal complications after kidney transplantation

Rossella Gioco  1 , Daniela Corona  2 , Burcin Ekser  3 , Lidia Puzzo  4 , Gaetano Inserra  5 , Flavia Pinto  1 , Chiara Schipa  1 , Francesca Privitera  1 , Pierfrancesco Veroux  6 , Massimiliano Veroux  7
Affiliations
Review

Gastrointestinal complications after kidney transplantation

Rossella Gioco et al. World J Gastroenterol. .

Abstract

Gastrointestinal complications are common after renal transplantation, and they have a wide clinical spectrum, varying from diarrhoea to post-transplant inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Chronic immunosuppression may increase the risk of post-transplant infection and medication-related injury and may also be responsible for IBD in kidney transplant re-cipients despite immunosuppression. Differentiating the various forms of post-transplant colitis is challenging, since most have similar clinical and histological features. Drug-related colitis are the most frequently encountered colitis after kidney transplantation, particularly those related to the chronic use of mycophenolate mofetil, while de novo IBDs are quite rare. This review will explore colitis after kidney transplantation, with a particular focus on different clinical and histological features, attempting to clearly identify the right treatment, thereby improving the final outcome of patients.

Keywords: Colitis; Crohn disease; Cytomegalovirus; Inflammatory bowel disease; Kidney transplantation; Mycophenolate mofetil; Mycophenolate mofetil colitis; Solid organ transplantation; Ulcerative colitis.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest for this article.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Cytomegalovirus colitis. A: Positivity for early cytomegalovirus antigen on immunochemistry; and B: Positivity for Ki-67 antigen on immunochemistry.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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