[Chronic renal failure after heart, lung, liver, or intestine transplantation].

Abstract

Acute and especially chronic renal failure (CRF) are relatively common and important risk factor for morbidity and mortality in patients after heart, lung, liver or intestine transplantation. Numerous factors contribute to the development of CRF in this group of patients, like treatment with calcineurin inhibitors and other nephrotoxic drugs in the perioperative period, hemodynamical changes during and after the surgery, preexistent renal disease, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, dyslipidemia and anemia. Pretransplant evaluation of renal function is mandatory to predict which patients have increased risk for development of CRF. In the posttransplantation course it is necessary to timely diagnose and treat renal failure, while patients with insufficient renal function have 4.55-fold increased risk of death compared to patients with normal renal function. Special problem is diagnostic approach to patients with suspected chronic renal disease who are candidates for transplantation of other parenhimatose organs. Diagnostic value of serum creatinine and estimation of renal function based on its value is very limited. Gold diagnostic standard is radioisotope estimation of glomerular filtration, but this method is not widely available. It seems that this problem may be solved with the use of cystatin C, but this approach needs to be validated in large studies. Numerous different immunosuppressive drugs available on the market enable individualization of immunosuppression. Different drugs combinations may have less nephrotoxic potential, but one must be careful because of the possible risk of organ rejection with the change of immunosuppression. Use of angiotensin convertase enzyme inhibitors and/or angiotensin receptor blockers, statins with drugs for control of hyperglycemia, may prevent or postpone development of CRF. Although technical advances of contemporary hemodialysis machines and peritoneal dialysis equipment enable well tolerated dialysis even in critically ill patients, renal transplantation remains the method of choice for treatment of patients with transplanted parenhimatous organ that developed CRF.