Sickness Symptoms and Their Associations with the Gut Microbiome Features in Kidney Transplant Recipient

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate sickness symptoms--depressive symptoms, anxiety and fatigue--experience in kidney transplant recipients (KTR) and their associations with the gut microbial features. Chapter I contains overall background of my dissertation study. Chapter II is a scoping review to synthesize available evidence for sickness symptoms in KTRs, including findings on symptom prevalence, predictors and outcomes, and interrelationships and clustering in KTRs. Chapter III documents a pilot study performed to explore gut microbiome features and sickness symptom severity in KTRs at three timepoints and to examine longitudinal associations between gut microbiome features and sickness symptom severity. The research addresses an important gap in knowledge about symptom experiences in KTRs and how gut microbial features are related to sickness symptoms.