Effect of Cytomegalovirus Exposure on the Atherosclerotic Events Among Kidney-Transplanted Patients, A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Context: Atherosclerosis is considered as the important cause of death worldwide and especially among kidney-transplanted patients. It is said that an aggressive intervention is needed for preventing new atherosclerotic events post kidney transplantation. Our main purpose was to determine the effect of cytomegalovirus (CMV) exposure on the atherosclerotic events among kidneytransplanted patients using a systematic review and meta-analysis. Evidence Acquisition: Electronic databases (PubMed, Scopus, Science Direct, and Web of Science) were systematically searched to find related studies for the effect of CMV exposure on the atherosclerosis in the kidney transplantation setting. Quality assessment was done and then because of existence of heterogeneity we used random-effect model to calculate risk ratio (RR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) for the CMV effect on the atherosclerosis. Results: Ten Studies were included in our systematic review. Eight of them proposedCMVas a risk factors for atherosclerosis among kidney-transplanted patients. According to available data for analysis, seven papers were included in our meta-analysis and showed RR of 1.46 (95% CI: 1.15 - 1.85) for the mentioned effect and based on the trim and fill method the corrected RR was as 1.26 (95% CI: 1.01 - 1.65). Conclusions: Our meta-analysis showed that exposure with CMV can lead to atherosclerosis events among kidney-transplanted patients. However, more original studies are still needed to explore the association between the type of CMV exposure and atherosclerotic events.