Thrombotic microangiopathy following allogeneic bone marrow transplantation

Thrombotic microangiopathy is one of the complications of bone marrow transplantation and is related to other complications such as graft-versus-host disease, veno-occlusive disease, diffuse alveolar hemorrhage, and cytomegalovirus infection. Thrombotic microangiopathy occurred in three out of 12 patients who underwent allogeneic bone marrow transplantation over the past 1 year at our department. We compared the changes in cytokines and other molecules between patients with and without microangiopathy from before conditioning to the early post-transplantation period. All three patients with microangiopathy showed a significant increase of interleukin-12 at the time of leukocyte recovery after transplantation (two-way layout analysis of variance; P < 0.05), while none of the patients without microangiopathy showed an increase of interleukin-12. No significant differences were found between the two groups with respect to the other cytokines and molecules that were tested. These findings suggested that thrombotic microangiopathy might be predicted at an early stage after bone marrow transplantation by detecting an increase of interleukin-12 at the time of leukocyte recovery. The possibility that thrombotic microangiopathy is related to inflammation or autoimmunity was also suggested.