The third edition of Diagnostic Pathology: Transplant Pathology continues the traditions of the Diagnostic Pathology series by providing a well-organised, up-to-date and comprehensive review of current entities routinely encountered in transplant pathology.

The book is divided into 11 sections, with the first 3 sections providing an excellent overview of immunology, as it relates to transplant medicine, human leukocyte antigen testing and immunosuppressive drugs. These sections help to explain the complex, expansive and often overlapping pathophysiology, genetics and therapeutics that underpin the practice of transplant medicine. This provides a good foundation to better understand the complications we might encounter as pathologists.

The following sections relate to the different types of transplants – namely kidney, liver, heart, lung, intestinal, pancreas and vascularised composite allotransplants. The final section covers post-transplant lymphoproliferative disease, a condition that can present in biopsies that are seemingly unrelated to a patient’s history of transplant.

The sections covering the different types of allograft all begin with a brief discussion on the history of each type of transplant, examination and evaluation of these tissues and the pathological classification of diseases within each. The sections then divide to cover rejection, surgical complications, recurrent and novel disease of transplanted organs, drug toxicities and infection, as appropriate.

Each entity is discussed in a well-structured, straightforward and concise manner, with information presented in a bullet point format. There are very helpful tables included with relevant up-to-date classifications and scoring systems. As with all the Diagnostic Pathology textbooks, there are excellent, high-quality colour images for each topic. Each image also comes with detailed annotations of salient features. In particular, there are excellent macroscopic images within Section 6: Heart transplant and very helpful electron microscopy images within Section 4: Kidney transplant.

The online version of the book, available with the code inside the front cover through Elsevier eBooks, provides an additional excellent resource that can be accessed when the physical book is not nearby. This allows for on-the-go reading/revision and provides excellent digital images and hyperlinks to relevant references.

While not every centre will routinely deal with transplant pathology, these patients can often present outside their tertiary transplant centre and with apparently unrelated pathology, so having this easy-to-read (and picture-match) comprehensive textbook to reference would be extremely helpful.

Overall, I find this textbook to be well written, with excellent images and helpful hints throughout. At £189.99 it isn’t cheap, but, given that the text is comprehensive, up-to-date and provides a helpful basis on which to fully work up a transplant-related specimen, I feel it offers good value for money.

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