A severe case of haemodynamic instability during anidulafungin administration.

WHAT IS KNOWN AND OBJECTIVE: Anidulafugin is an echinocandin used for the treatment of candida infections in non-neutropenic adults. Echinocandins show few drug-drug interactions and are usually well tolerated. We report a case of acute hypotension, bradycardia and haemodynamic instability with consecutive cardiopulmonary resuscitation during anidulafungin administration. CASE SUMMARY: A 41-year-old man ICU patient received anidulafungin for a suspected Candida glabrata infection. During the first administration of the drug, he developed acute haemodynamic instability with hypotension and bradycardia. The infusion was discontinued immediately and cardiopulmonary resuscitation was performed successfully. The patient regained haemodynamic stability. WHAT IS NEW AND CONCLUSION: To the authors' knowledge, this is the first report of a life-threatening adverse event due to haemodynamic instability during anidulafungin administration. Cardiac toxicity associated with echinocandins has been described. Further studies seem to be mandatory to investigate this potential risk.

(18)F-FDG positron emission tomography in the early diagnosis of enterocolitis: preliminary results.

Collagenous and eosinophilic colitis are rare diseases characterised by chronic watery diarrhoea. Radiographic evaluation of the gastrointestinal tract and colonoscopy are usually non-diagnostic since as many as one-third of patients will have minor abnormalities. To date a few investigators have reported increased fluorine-18 fluorodeoxyglucose ((18)F-FDG) uptake on positron emission tomography (PET) in patients with acute enterocolitis, but there have been no reports on the use of (18)F-FDG PET for the diagnosis of collagenous or eosinophilic colitis in an early clinical stage. The aim of this preliminary study was to evaluate the usefulness of (18)F-FDG PET in the early diagnosis of patients with colitis. We investigated five women (mean age 61.2+/-12.1 years) who had been diagnosed as having colitis in an early clinical stage. In all but one of the patients, the diagnosis of colitis was based on biopsy. Magnetic resonance colonography, ultrasonography and colonoscopy were performed in all but one of the patients. Two women were identified as having collagenous colitis in an early clinical stage. Another two patients had eosinophilic colitis. The morphological imaging methods, magnetic resonance colonography and ultrasonography, yielded no suspicious findings, and the results of colonoscopy similarly showed no abnormalities. One patient had colitis due to bacterial infection. In all patients (18)F-FDG PET showed a pathological increase in tracer uptake in the large bowel, suggestive of colitis. In four of the five patients, colitis was confirmed by histology, and in one, by bacterial analysis. (18)F-FDG PET was able to detect colitis in an early clinical stage, when morphological imaging methods and colonoscopy were non-diagnostic. The early performance of (18)F-FDG PET imaging in patients with possible colitis is encouraging.