The Strategy in the Prevention of Renal Post-transplant Cytomegalovirus Infection Among Chinese Population

Overview

This study evaluates the safety and availability of oral valganciclovir(VGC) at the does of 450mg daily begin within 10 days after renal transplantation, and till to Day 100 posttransplant. Compare to the guidelines for effective antiviral prophylaxis, the investigators divide these patients into three groups in random. One third will oral VGC 450mg daily as mentioned above; one third will oral VGC 900mg daily; and the other one third will intravenous GCV 5mg/kg daily within the first 14 days posttransplant, and continue to oral GCV 1g 3 times daily till to Day 100 posttransplant; with does adjusted per renal function for all agents.

Human Cytomegalovirus(CMV), a kind of β-hepersvirus, which is a common opportunistic pathogen. The ubiquity of CMV infection in human beings had been verified; and the CMV-IgG seropositive rate is 97% among healthy population, most of them are at the state of latent infection. When immunosuppressed, such as for renal transplant recipients, the incidence of CMV infection and disease increase obviously. The posttransplant CMV infection would induce allgraft rejection, impact on allgraft and recipients survival, as well as contribute to the serious complications.Many studies show that giving effective antivirus drugs after transplantation is benifit to recipients. Nowadays,the strategy of intravenous GCV GCV 5mg/kg daily or oral GCV 1g 3 times daily, which is the recommended treatment for CMV disease posttransplantation.Resent date show that VGC is an oral prodrug of GCV. When VGC is absorbed in the intestinal wall and liver, it is rapidly metabolized to ganciclovir. As a contemporary study, IV GCV 5mg/kg/day will approach to a similar area under the curve to VGC 900mg daily. The bioavailability of ganciglovir from valganciclovir is 10 times of GCV by oral. For recipients, oral therapy is more safety and convinient, so that it will reduce frequent hospitalizations. As many researches, it is indicated that oral VGC 450mg daily can also reduce the adverse events resulting from posttransplant CMV infection, there is no significantly statistic differences when compared with oral VGC 900mg daily. Simultaneously, lower dose could decrease the risk of leukopenia and ease the burden for recipients. This study is a single-center, prospective, observational, corhort study. According to the inclusion and exclusion criteria, the investigators will recruit 450 patients. And every one will be followed up for at least 12 months unless death or graft loss, the specific duration is at baseline, weekly within the first 3 months posttransplantation, month 4, month 5, month 6, month 9, and month 12. Recipients will be followed for CMV-DNA, CMV-pp65, CMV antigenemia, blood routine test, urinalysis, liver function, renal fuction and the chest X-ray films. Inverstigators should collect the date of recipient as below: general conditions, such as age, sex, weight and so on; primary reason for transplant; donor/recipient CMV serostatus; biopsy-prove acute rejection; opportunistic infections; NODAT; etc. And Chi-square or Fisher's exact test will be used as appropriate to compare categorical variables, and it is considered as statistically significant when the 2-sided P-value\<0.05. Definitively, conclusion will be come out to verify the safety and availability of our protocol.