Gastrointestinal complications

Abstract

Gastrointestinal complications such as mucositis and graft-versus-host disease of the alimentary tract in patients treated for haematological diseases diminish the quality of life. More importantly, those patients are put at risk to serious life-threatening infectious complications, like sepsis or neutropenic enterocolitis when the patient is already immunocompromised either by neutropenia or dysfunctional cellular immunity. The treatment-induced mucosal barrier injury of the gastrointestinal tract, especially in stem cell transplant recipients, is a complex, dynamic pathobiological process that needs to be adequately detected to allow proper therapeutic interventions to be successful to warrant patient-tailored supportive management care and improve survival.