Purpose: Lung transplant recipients are known to be at risk of a postoperative malignancy. In Western countries, skin cancer and post-transplant lymphoproliferative disorder (PTLD) are the most common malignancies in this cohort. We conducted this study to evaluate the characteristics of postoperative malignancies in Japanese patients following living-donor lobar lung transplantation (LDLLT) or cadaveric lung transplantation (CLT).
Methods: We reviewed the medical records of 120 Japanese patients who underwent either LDLLT (n = 62) or CLT (n = 58) between April 2002 and July 2015.
Results: Postoperative malignancy developed in 11 patients (9.2 %), as PTLD in 7, breast cancer in 1, gastric cancer in 1, glioblastoma in 1, and adenocarcinoma of unknown primary in 1. Twenty-six (21.7 %) of the 120 transplant patients had a history of malignancy pre-transplant; however, the postoperative malignancies were all de novo without any recurrence of the original disease. The malignancies developed after LDLLT in six patients (9.7 %) and after CLT in 5 patients (8.6 %). Three of the four patients with solid organ malignancies had distant metastasis at diagnosis. Three patients died of PTLD and one patient died of gastric cancer.
Conclusions: PTLD occurred after both LDLLT and CLT. There was no case of skin cancer in this series of Japanese patients, suggesting ethnic differences. Solid organ malignancies in lung transplant recipients tended to progress rapidly.
Keywords: Cadaveric lung transplantation; Living-donor lobar lung transplantation; Malignancy; Postoperative lymphoproliferative disorder.