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. 2022 Jun 22;10(7):990.
doi: 10.3390/vaccines10070990.

How Vaccinations Changed the Outcome of COVID-19 Infections in Kidney Transplant Patients: Single-Center Experience

Mariarosaria Campise  1 , Carlo Maria Alfieri  1   2 , Matteo Benedetti  1 , Alessandro Perna  3 , Roberta Miglio  4 , Paolo Molinari  1 , Angela Cervesato  3 , Silvia Giuliani  1 , Maria Teresa Gandolfo  1 , Anna Regalia  1 , Donata Cresseri  1 , Laura Alagna  5 , Andrea Gori  5   6 , Giuseppe Castellano  1   2
Affiliations

How Vaccinations Changed the Outcome of COVID-19 Infections in Kidney Transplant Patients: Single-Center Experience

Mariarosaria Campise et al. Vaccines (Basel). .

Abstract

Kidney transplant recipients are a vulnerable population at risk of a life-threatening COVID-19 infection with an incidence of death four-times higher than in the general population. The availability of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines has dramatically changed the fate of this infection also within this fragile population. Transplanted patients have an impaired immunological response also to mRNA vaccines. In March 2021, however, we started a vaccination campaign. These preliminary results show that both the incidence of death and of hospitalization dropped from 13% to 2.4% and from 45% to 12.5% compared to the previous outbreaks reported by our group. In univariate analysis, two variables were associated with an increased risk of hospitalization: older age and dyspnea (p = 0.023, p < 0.0001, respectively). In multivariate analysis, dyspnea (p < 0.0001) and mycophenolate therapy (p = 0.003) were independently associated with the risk of hospitalization. The association was even stronger when the two variables were combined (p < 0.0001). Vaccinations did not reduce the incidence of COVID-19 infections among our transplanted patients, but provided certain protection that was associated with a significantly better outcome for this infection.

Keywords: COVID vaccination; COVID-19 infection; kidney transplant; public health.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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