Background: To explore the efficacy of postoperative antifungal treatment for preventing the recurrence of pulmonary cryptococcosis (PC) and occurrence of cryptococcal meningitis (CM), a retrospective study was conducted in 112 hospitalized PC patients with or without antifungal treatment following surgery.
Methods: The treatment failure rate, PC recurrence rate, and CM incidence were compared. Additionally, the effectiveness of postoperative antifungal therapy was assessed by gathering and analyzing the published literature.
Results: The failure rate (P = .054) and recurrence rate (P = .178) were similar in the 2 groups, but the incidence of CM was lower in the group that received postoperative antifungal treatment (P = .039).
Conclusions: This study did not show any difference in the PC recurrence rate or failure rate in the different treatment duration groups. Thus, a shorter antifungal treatment course of 2 months may be an optional treatment. In addition, upon review of the literature, no case of CM occurrence was reported among the 169 cases given postoperative antifungal treatment.
Keywords: antifungal therapy; cryptococcal meningitis; pulmonary cryptococcosis; surgery.
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Infectious Diseases Society of America.