Effects of portacaval shunting on Schistosoma japonicum infection in chimpanzees: dissociation of pipe-stem fibrosis and glomerulopathy.

Eight of 10 young chimpanzees were infected with the Japanese strain of Schistosoma japonicum. In 6 of these, and in 1 normal chimpanzee, a surgical end-to-side portacaval shunt was constructed during the 8th week of infection. One additional infected chimpanzee was treated successfully with the nitrovinylfuran, SQ 18,506. In the four animals surviving both infection and shunting hepatic portal fibrosis was either absent or mild. In the 7-month survivors and in the drug-treated control animals there was evidence of healed portal endophlebitis and arterialization, but no active schistosomal liver lesion was found. Nevertheless, three of these animals showed variable degrees of active schistosomal glomerulopathy, similar to that seen in the unshunted infected control and to that described in earlier studies. There was a shift of the egg burden from the liver to the lungs, as well as evidence that the number of surviving adult worms had decreased following portacaval shunting. These observations sugggest that schistosomal nephropathy in chimpanzees is more closely related to infection intensity per se than to the degree of liver damage caused by infection.