Background: For a patient presenting with fever, multiple lymphadenopathy and splenomegaly, pathogen infection should be preferentially considered, followed by lymphoid malignancies. When traditional laboratory and pathological detection cannot find the pathogenic microorganism, metagenomic sequencing (MGS) which targets the person's genome for exceptional genetic disorders may detect a rare pathogen.
Case presentation: Here, we introduced the diagnostic clue of a case of multicentric Castleman disease (MCD) with hemophagocytic syndrome which was elicited from the detection of human herpesvirus-8 in the blood of a HIV-1 infected person by MGS technology during pathogen inspection. This case highlights the need to increase the awareness of MCD among clinicians and pathologists.
Conclusions: MGS technology may play a pivotal role in providing diagnostic clues during pathogen inspection, especially when pathogens are not detectable by conventional methods.
Keywords: Hemophagocytic syndrome; Human herpes virus-8; Metagenomic sequencing technology; Multicentric Castleman disease.
© 2021. The Author(s).