Clinical Features of Pulmonary Nocardiosis in Patients with Different Underlying Diseases: A Case Series Study

To investigate the clinical features of pulmonary nocardiosis (PN) in patients with different underlying diseases.

Clinical, imaging, treatment and prognosis data from patients diagnosed with PN from July 2011 to June 2021 at the First Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine were collected and analyzed. According to different underlying diseases, patients were grouped into immunocompromised host (ICH) group and immunocompetent host (ICO) group, and clinical characteristics were compared between the two groups.

There were 64 patients with PN, including 42 males, aged from 21 to 86 (57.1 ± 15.7) years. The most common clinical manifestations were cough, expectoration, fever. There were 41 cases in the ICH group and 23 cases in the ICO group. There were 11 cases with underlying pulmonary diseases in the ICH group, including 2 cases of bronchiectasis, 4 cases of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), etc. There were 11 cases of underlying pulmonary basic diseases in ICO group, including 7 cases of bronchiectasis and COPD, 1 case of bronchiectasis, 1 case of COPD, etc. The proportion of patients with bronchiectasis and COPD in the ICO group was significantly higher (P < 0.05). Extrapulmonary nocardiosis infection occurred in 6 patients of the ICH group. During the period of hospitalization, 87.0% patients in ICO group received SMZ/TMP therapy, 73.2% of patients in ICH group received two drug combination therapy. In the ICH group, mortality at 28 days was 14.6% and 8.7% in the ICO group.

PN mainly occurred in ICH patients, but also occurred in the ICO cases to a lesser extent, especially in patients with bronchiectasis and/or COPD. Complicated with extrapulmonary infections mainly occurred in ICH population and combination of two antibiotics was often used in ICH group. The case fatality rates were 14.6% in ICH and 8.7% in ICO cases, respectively.