[The Significance of Pulmonary Function Testing Before and After Allogeneic Stem Cell Transplantation]

Allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo-HCT) is a curative treatment for many kinds of hematological diseases, but high transplant-related mortality (TRM), involving almost one quarter of patients who receive allo-HCT, remains problematic. TRM is mainly caused by infection (bacteria, virus, and fun- gus), acute or chronic graft versus host disease (GVHD), and/or organ dysfunction, such as-that involving the liver, lung, and/or kidney. Post-transplant infectious or noninfectious pulmonary complications are some of the important events after allo-HCT that may often be associated with TRM. The pre- or post-transplant pulmonary function test (PFT) plays an important role for the following reasons: 1) It may predict the devel- opment of noninfectious pulmonary complications such as chronic GVHD of the lung, i.e., bronchiolitis oblit- erans syndrome (BOS). 2) The diagnostic criteria and evaluation of the severity of BOS contain some PFT parameters. Therefore, we are not able to diagnose a patient with BOS nor evaluate the severity without PFT. 3) Pre- and post-transplant PFTs predict TRM and/or the overall transplant outcome. In order to improve the allo-HCT outcome, future studies of PFT in allo-HCT are needed. [Review].