First Report of Urinary Tract Infection due to Pichia ohmeri

Abstract

In recent years, an increase in the number of nosocomial infections due to yeasts has been observed. Although Candida is the genus most frequently isolated from these infections, other yeasts such as Blastoschizomyces, Geotrichum, Trichosporon, Rhodotorula and Pichia species are being found more frequently [1,2]. Species belonging to the genus Pichia, especially Pichia anomala, have rarely been involved in human infections [3,4], and Pichia ohmeri has been reported as a human pathogen in only three previous cases [5,6,7]. Here, we present the first case of urinary tract infection due to Pichia ohmeri, which occurred in a hematological patient.A 73-year-old man with a 5-year history of nonHodgkin's lymphoma being treated with chemotherapy and high-dose corticoids presented to our hospital with malaise, pain in the right iliac region radiating to the hipogastric region, and fever of 38.5°C. His medical history showed he had undergone a splenectomy and had received an indwelling catheter because of a thoracic vertebral fracture at the T11 level that occurred after medular infiltration. The patient's hemogram revealed 13,000 leukocytes/mm 3 with 67% neutrophils. The biochemical study only showed urea 88 mg/dl, and the coagulation study was normal. A dark and cloudy urine sample was collected from the catheter bag, and the urinary sediment showed 50-100 leukocytes/high power field (40×) and candiduria. Culture of a urine sample was performed, and >10 5 colony-forming units (cfu)/mm 3 of yeast were counted. A later culture resulted in isolation of the same yeast.The isolate was identified as Pichia ohmeri by the commercial identification system ID32-C (bioMérieux, France) according to the following morphological characteristics: colony morphotype on CHROMagar Candida medium (Beckton-Dickinson, France), blastesis, hyphae/

Kodamaea ohmeri infections in humans: A systematic review

“…No additional studies were found during the hand‐screening of the included articles' references. Finally, 35 met the present study's inclusion criteria 3,4,7–39 . The review process is graphically presented in Figure 1.…”

Kodameae ohmeri – An Emerging Yeast: Two Cases and Literature Review

“…It was also reported to cause outbreak in paediatric intensive care unit [11]. Although majority of cases reported are fungemia (as in the indexed patients), infections of other sites have also been documented [2, [12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. We reported a case of funguria due to K. ohmeri in a diabetic patient earlier [13].…”

A case report of fungemia due to Kodamaea ohmeri

“…K. ohmeri is a yeast known to cause invasive infections [3]. In the literature, we identified 73 cases of fungemia due to K. ohmeri [2, 4, 5], 2 cases of peritonitis [6, 7], 3 cases of endocarditis [8–10], one case of urinary tract infection [11], one case of cellulitis [12].…”