Introduction and Objectives;
Lophomonas blattarum is a multiflagellated protozoan, parasitizing arthropods, especially the intestine of termites and cockroaches. Human infection with this flagellate was first reported in China in 1993. Recently this protozoan has been frequently encountered in patients with pulmonary diseases. The pathogenesis of this protozoan in humans is still debatable. Since little is known on the epidemiology and pathobiology of this protozoa, we conducted a comprehensive scoping review to investigate and integrate available information on this emerging protozoan. Materials and methods: All documents on L. blattarum were extracted in May 2019 from three leading scientific databases, Scopus, PubMed and Google Scholar (title only) using the keyword
Lophomonas blattarum with no time limits. Two individuals studied the data independently and the documents were reviewed and organized in a spreadsheet based on different article features including first author, corresponding author, publication year, country, journal title, citations, article type and topic, host and patient population. Results: As of 1933, we found 43 documents in Scopus, 30 in PubMed and 79 articles in Google Scholar.
Lophomonas blattarum has attracted a lot of attention in the last decade so that 64% of articles have been published in this period. Half of the publications were performed in China, mostly published in the Chinese Journal of Parasitology and Parasitic Diseases. Only five investigations including two case reports have been published from Iran. The most studied patient/host population were humans with bronchopulmonary infections. The meanSD citations per paper was 4 4.4. Conclusion: Obviously further studies are required on the epidemiology and pathobiology of this flagellate in different regions of the world. Our results indicate L. blattarum has not yet been widely investigated in Iran.