A general evaluation on pulmonary nocardiosis due to three patients presenting with a mass like radiographic appearance on chest X-ray

Pulmonary nocardiosis is an important cause of opportunistic infection in immune-compromised patients. Pulmonary nocardiosis manifests as an acute, subacute or chronic infection. Although, there is specific treatment, there are usually difficulties in its diagnosis and, therefore nocardiosis already has a high rate of mortality. All of the nocardia infections of our study were pulmonary nocardiosis. The first case of our study was receiving immunosuppressive drugs after renal transplantation; second patient was receiving high dose corticosteroid and methotrexate due to the systemic lupus erithematosus; and third patient was newly diagnosed acute renal failure. All the diagnosis of pulmonary nocardiosis was done by isolation of the organism from bronchial lavage fluids. All patients were healed and discharged. The duration of therapy was 12 months in the first patients, 2 months in the second and 3 months in the third patient. According to results of our cases we concluded that nocardia tends to affect patients with cellular immune-compromised, physicians should notify the laboratory staff when Nocardia is suspected and the duration of therapy depends on the severity and the host\'s immune status.