Description

Despite long-term outcomes of kidney and liver transplantation significantly improved in the last decades, high morbidity and mortality is still an issue at short term after transplantation. Specifically, occurrence of delayed graft function (DGF) and early acute rejection (AR) may cause multi-organ failure or graft failure, admission to intensive care unit, prolonged hospitalization and high-dosage immunosuppressive therapy which might expose patients to several further complications such as infections, neoplasm, and metabolic disease. Consequently, solid organ transplant recipients represent a very frail population at high risk of complications. Therefore, development of new biomarkers for the prevention and early diagnosis of the major post-transplant complications influencing the morbidity and mortality of solid organ transplant recipients are needed. Adrenomedullin (ADM) is a 52-amino acid peptide with a variety of physiologic functions such as immunemodulating activity, direct bactericidal activity, maintenance of renal homeostasis, and vasodilatory activity. Recent study has shown that midregional proADM (MR-proADM) is co-synthesized with ADM in equimolar amounts and has the advantages of a longer half-life, lack of bioactivity and lack of protein binding. MR-proADM has been recognized as a prognostic marker, stratifying the mortality risk in patients with sepsis in intensive care units. Moreover, recently MD-proADM has been also associated with risk of specific organ failure such as acute kidney injury, acute liver damage, acute respiratory distress syndrome and acute cardiac injury. Literature results suggest that recovery of graft function after KT may lead to decrease in plasma MR-proADM level in patients with ESRD, and that plasma MR-proADM level may could increase in the early phases of DGF and AR after KT and LT as a response damage and to the immune activation. The study will allow to evaluate the utility MR-proADM as an early biomarker of DGF and AR in patients undergoing kidney and liver transplantation at our Institution. Also, the study aims to analyze how the value of this biomarker can change in association with post-transplant complication and to create a predicting model by machine cut-off values of references for MR-proADM.