A new report on lung transplantation success rates confirms that Cedars-Sinai patients experienced one-year survival outcomes of 91.49%, an achievement above the national average of 89.46%.
The data-; compiled by the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients-; provides a hopeful prognosis-; and options-;for patients requiring the complex yet lifesaving surgery.
Read more in News Medical Life Sciences.
Just over a year after receiving a double-lung transplant, a COVID-19 survivor is cycling 38-miles to raise funds for the nonprofit where he found support after his surgery.
Rick Bressler, Lock Haven, contracted the COVID-19 virus in March 2021, four days before he was scheduled to receive the vaccine. He was soon hospitalized and placed on a ventilator. Read the full story in NorthcentralPA.com.
After receiving a lung from a donor with known peanut allergy, a transplant patient with no history of allergy developed a temporary sensitization to peanut, according to a case study published in Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology.
This case suggests that IgE-mediated food allergies acquired from a donor through solid organ transplants may be transient, Stephanie Stojanovic, MBBS, registrar in allergy, asthma and clinical immunology at Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues wrote in the study. Read more in Healio.
Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered a potential therapeutic target in the donor lung that can prevent primary graft dysfunction (PGD) in lung transplant recipients, according to findings published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI).
GR Scott Budinger, MD, chief of Pulmonary and Critical Care in the Department of Medicine and the Ernest S. Bazley Professor of Airway Diseases, was senior author of the study. Read the full story from the Northwestern Medicine News Center.
A new diagnostic method could help identify one of the deadliest types of interstitial lung disease (ILD) sooner, allowing for faster treatment and improved patient outcomes.
Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is one of the most serious and common types of ILD, occurring most often in patients 60 and older with an average survival time of three to five years. At any given time roughly 300 patients are being treated for IPF in London, Ontario. Globally, it is the number one reason for lung transplants. Read more in Technology Networks.
Dennis Franklin thought he had come down with a cold when he was vacationing with his wife in Holden, Mo., in June 2021. Too tired to do anything, he cut the trip short.
Once home in St. Charles, Mo., he went to an urgent care center and was diagnosed with COVID-19 and pneumonia. Two days later, on his wedding anniversary, he didn’t wake up. When his wife, Julia, tried to rouse him, she realized he was barely breathing. She frantically called 911 and an ambulance rushed him to the local hospital. Read the full story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette here.
Almost 30 hours after my bilateral lung transplant, it was time for me to be extubated and take my first solo breath with my new lungs. My wife, Susan, was at my bedside, along with several nurses.
In a video of that day last July, you can hear Susan ask me if I’m ready to have the tube removed. I shook my head no.
But once the nurses removed the tube, an almost immediate calm came over me. I could breathe. Read more in Pulmonary Fibrosis News.
A lung transplant involves replacing a diseased lung with a healthy lung from a donor. Surgeons can swap out one or both lungs during this operation. Transplantation is an option for people with failing lungs due to a variety of health conditions. If a lung transplant is successful, it can offer many patients a longer, better quality of life.1
However, there are also serious risks to consider, including a higher chance of developing certain types of cancer after the transplantation. This risk is attributed to conventional risk factors, such as a history of smoking in both recipients and donors, and to immunosuppression after transplantation.2 Read the full article in Verywell Health.
SAN FRANCISCO — During the COVID-19 pandemic, people with chronic lung diseases, including asthma and COPD, were more likely to delay or avoid medical care compared with the general population or those with other COVID-19 risk factors
At the American Thoracic Society International Conference, Jane C. Fazio, MD, pulmonary critical care fellow at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, presented results of a cross-sectional secondary analysis of National Health Interview Survey data from the third and fourth quarters of 2020. Read the full story in Healio.
Racial disparities in COVID-19 mortality persist in the U.S. among lung transplant recipients, according to data presented at the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation Annual Meeting and Scientific Sessions.
“Our group was interested in trying to look at disparities and come up with ways of not only identifying but finding ways to intervene to decrease the disparities observed within the cardiac surgery population, which lung transplant recipients fall into,” Stanley B. Wolfe, MD, cardiac research fellow in surgery at the Corrigan Minehan Heart Center at Massachusetts General Hospital, told Healio. “We know that the transplant population, whether it be lung, heart, kidney, etc., have very close follow-up compared to a standard patient, but they also are immunosuppressed, which increases your overall risk of getting severe COVID-19, as well as dying from COVID-19.” Read the full story in Healio.