Introduction
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2
impacted the global health system in an unprecedented way. The rapid
development of various vaccines has become an important milestone in
combating the pandemic. Vaccination relies on the production of
antibodies via stimulation of humoral immunity. However, data regarding
antibody response to infection in immunosuppressed patients, including
kidney transplant recipients, is not well defined.
Different mortality rates for COVID-19 were reported from different
countries. According to a recent study in western countries, mortality
rates changed between 4.0% and 16.1% for reported cases. Higher
mortality rates were reported in patients with kidney disease,
specifically, in patients with kidney transplantation mortality ranging
between 18.0- 41.6% was reported in different studies [1-6].
Moreover, data on the seropositivity rate following COVID-19 in kidney
transplant recipients are scarce and not in agreement across studies.
According to a recent study, lower antibody response rates (41.0%) were
reported in kidney transplant recipients following recovery from the
infection [7,8]. On the other hand, Azzi et al. investigated 69
kidney transplant recipients with reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain
reaction (RT-PCR) confirmed COVID-19 infection, and they found
anti-nucleocapsid antibodies in 55 (80.0%) of them [9].
Usually, higher antibody response rates were reported for patients from
the general population [8]. In a recent study, anti-nucleoprotein
seropositivity was found as 78.2% among health care workers with RT-PCR
confirmed COVID-19 [10].
In this cross-sectional study, we aimed first to investigate the
prevalence of anti–SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in kidney transplant
recipients; secondly, we examined the factors associated with the
absence of antibody response.