October 19, 2022 – Sue Ford
When Cory Yager was hospitalized with a severe case of Covid last year, he promised himself he would not give up. His care team had no intentions of giving up, either.
The 43-year-old father from Lewis County, north of Syracuse in the Adirondacks, spent nearly 80 days at Albany Medical Center, kept alive by extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), prior to receiving a double lung transplant. Read the story from Albany MED Health System.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Expanding the selection criteria for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) as a bridge to lung transplant to include older and sicker patients was not associated with worse survival, a retrospective cohort study showed.
Other studies presented here during the “Lung Transplantation: New Issues in 2022” session at CHEST 2022, the annual meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians, included one on sociodemographic trends in lung transplant in the U.S. from 2001 through 2021, and two presentations on COVID-19 in lung transplant recipients.
Read more in MedPage Today.
Many resources are available to help you learn post-transplant dietary restrictions
Those who follow my column know that one of my passions is cooking. It always has been. My wife, Susan, and I usually eat meals I prepare using little to no prepackaged ingredients. Dinner usually included wine for me.
But what I can eat and drink changed on July 10, 2021, the day I received my bilateral lung transplant.
When I was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in January 2017, we entered a world that was new to us. We wanted to better understand this disease, so we sought to learn as much as possible. My care team at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Fairfax County, Virginia, was an essential part of our pursuit of knowledge. Read more in Pulmonary Fibrosis News.
A recent The Annals of Thoracic Surgery journal study reports that the survival rate of lung transplant (LT) recipients who experienced respiratory failure following infection with the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was not significantly different than the survival rates among patients who received an LT due to other lung etiologies. Read more in News Medical Life Sciences.
Columnist Sam Kirton is quick to respond to some concerning symptoms
While working on today’s column, I considered writing about my birthday on Oct. 4. Then, a topic came to me quite unexpectedly.
On Monday, Sept. 26, I had to go to the hospital. Since the pandemic began, I’ve been careful to avoid large crowds in enclosed spaces and to always wear a mask indoors. So I was quite surprised to learn I had pneumonia — a significant complication for a post-lung transplant patient. Read more in Pulmonary Fibrosis News.
Despite a lower overall mortality rate, lung transplant recipients remain at high risk for severe disease and death from the COVID-19 omicron variant compared with both the general population and other respiratory infections.
“[The omicron variant] is shown to be associated with lower severity of illness in the general population, particularly among the vaccinated, compared to the preceding variants,” Jamie Hum, DNP, lung transplant nurse practitioner in the division of pulmonary and critical care medicine and with the Lung Transplant Program at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and colleagues wrote in Annals of the American Thoracic Society. Read more in Healio.
Obesity, fractional exhaled nitric oxide and maximum bronchodilator reversibility were among the factors that precited lower FEV1 over time among children with asthma, according to a study in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
Also, boys with recurrent exacerbations had higher risks for lower FEV1 in childhood, Jonathan M. Gaffin, MD, MMSc, co-director of the severe asthma program at Boston Children’s Hospital, and colleagues wrote. Read the full story in Healio.
Children with increased exposure to nature during childhood had improved lung function in later life, according to study findings published in European Respiratory Journal.
“We found that living in greener neighborhoods as children grow up is more important for their breathing than living in a green area when they were born,” Diogo Queiroz Almeida, MD,PhD candidate in the department of public health and forensic sciences and medical education at the Institute of Public Health, University of Porto, Portugal, said in a press release. “This may be because babies spend much less time outdoors than children.”
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 more in Medical Xpress.
It was 422 days at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
That’s the length of Ashburn-area resident Colette Hurd’s stay due to her idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension, a condition that affects blood vessels in the lungs and the right side of the heart and causes the heart and lungs to weaken over time.
Read the full story in the Chicago Tribune.