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Pretransplant chest computed tomography screening in asymptomatic patients with leukemia and myelodysplastic syndrome

Bone Marrow Transplantation volume 52, pages 476–479 (2017)Cite this article

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Radiographic screening of asymptomatic patients before hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) remains controversial with no consensus among transplant centers.13Studies evaluating the merit of routine chest computed tomography (CT) screening are limited, as are those evaluating whether abnormal findings on pre-HSCT chest CT correlate with higher rates of pulmonary complications after allogeneic HSCT.4, 5, 6, 7

We conducted a single-center retrospective study of patients with leukemia and myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS), who were evaluated in the outpatient transplant clinic at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center (MDACC) from January 2011 through July 2015. The Institutional Review Board approved the protocol and waived the requirement for obtaining informed consent. Screening chest CT pre-HSCT is not routine and that practice is clinician dependent. We identified those patients who had pretransplant chest CT during the time frame of the study from the Bone Marrow Transplantation database (800 patients). Then, we reviewed each chart of eligible patients by excluding all patients, who had chest CT for non-screening purposes or if they were symptomatic. In addition, we excluded the patients who had a recent pulmonary event within 90 days, to further help us eliminate the ‘follow-up’ chest CT. Interpretation of chest CT abnormalities were done by MDACC radiologists, according to established criteria.8 We excluded patients with underlying lymphoma and prior HSCT. We used Wilcoxon rank sum test and χ2 or Fisher exact test to compare continuous and categorical variables, respectively. All tests were two-sided and had a significance level of 0.05. The analyses were performed using SAS version 9.3 (SAS Institute Inc, Cary, NC, USA).

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Acknowledgements

DK acknowledges the Frances King Black Endowment for Cancer Research. We thank Mr Bryan Tutt from MDACC Department of Scientific Publications for his editorial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Infectious Diseases, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, USA

    Z El Boghdadly, Y Jiang & D P Kontoyiannis

  2. Department of Stem Cell Transplantation, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, USA

    B Oran, G Rondon & R Champlin

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  1. Z El Boghdadly
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  2. B Oran
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  6. D P Kontoyiannis
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Correspondence to D P Kontoyiannis.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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El Boghdadly, Z., Oran, B., Jiang, Y. et al. Pretransplant chest computed tomography screening in asymptomatic patients with leukemia and myelodysplastic syndrome. Bone Marrow Transplant 52, 476–479 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/bmt.2016.309

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