Epidemiology and risk factors of early urinary tract infections after renal transplantation

Aim: Renal transplantation, the most important and successful treatment of end stage renal failure, usually results with infections, especially the urinary tract infections.We wanted to determine the infection ingredients and risk factors of urinary tract infections after renal transplantation at the patients in our clinique.Material and Method: We evaluated 63 patients 1 year prospectively. The risk factors, variables such as the etiology of chronic renal failure, the duration of preoperative dialysis, operative times, transplantation from alive or deceased donor, follow up length of the drains or catheters, used immune suppresives, time and number of hospitalization were examined and the relationship between the risk factors and urinary tract infections was evaluated.Results: Totally 24 infection attacks were seen in 12 patients. E. coli and K.pneumonia were found to be the most isolated microorganisms. The infections after transplantation frequently were seen at the time interval of first 120 days. For the other variables, there was no significant difference detected. Assessing all the variables, hospitalization numbers of the transplant patients after the postoperative discharge were detected significantly more frequent in patients with urinary tract infection attacks as compared with the transplant patients without infection attacks, but this difference was statistically insignificant (p= 0,052).Conclusion: At the first year of renal transplantation followup, especially the first 120 days, the attention must be paid for urinary tract infections. The transplant patients, hospitalized due to different reasons, must be evaluated from the view of disease development, especially they have history of urinary tract infection.