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Likelihood of lung transplant in IPF linked to access, ZIP code income

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Regardless of disease severity and lung transplant eligibility, patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis who have access to a lung transplant center and live in more affluent areas have a higher probability of undergoing lung transplant.

“As clinicians and policymakers strive to ensure that eligible patients with IPF have equal opportunity to undergo a lung transplant, a better understanding of factors associated with lung transplant is needed,” Aparna Swaminathan, MD, assistant professor of medicine and member in the Duke Clinical Research Institute and the Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, and colleagues wrote. Read more.

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Damaged Lungs Breathe Life into University of Kentucky COVID Research

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on the bottom of a sealed plastic container. It doesn’t look like much ­­– in fact, it doesn’t look like anything. But this little black lump has untold potential, full of secrets for the researchers at Kentucky Research Alliance for Lung Disease (K-RALD) to discover about the pandemic that has ravaged the world for more than two years.

This black lump is a sample of a lung from a COVID-19 patient. Specifically, it belonged to Dave Hoover, the first Kentuckian to receive a double lung transplant after contracting COVID-19. Hoover fell ill in February 2021, and after declining rapidly, he was transplanted two months later. He donated his lungs to researchers in the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, who added it to the K-RALD biobank of lung samples. Read more.

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Good Outcomes in COVID-19 Lung Transplants

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Patients with COVID-19-associated acute respiratory distress syndrome who received lung transplants had similar outcomes, compared to transplant patients without COVID-19, according to a Northwestern Medicine study published in JAMA.

The findings demonstrate the viability of lung transplants in patients with COVID-19-associated acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), according to Ankit Bharat, MBBS, the Harold L. and Margaret N. Method Research Professor of Surgery, chief of Thoracic Surgery in the Department of Surgery and senior author of the study. Read the full story.

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By altering the blood type of lungs, researchers raise the possibility of universal organs for transplants

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t was 4 a.m. on a humid night in St. Catharines, Ontario, and Elizabeth Ostrander couldn’t breathe. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, complicated by pneumonia, was suffocating her, doctors told her that day in 2016. If she hadn’t gotten to the hospital when she did, she would have died, Ostrander remembers them saying. She was in her early 50s.
Read the full story here.

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Lung transplants encouraging treatment for COVID-19 patients, but long-term outcomes still uncertain

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Recent data bolster the value of lung transplants for some COVID-19 patients, indicating they do as well after surgery as those who needed new lungs for other reasons.

The complicated, risky procedure remains rare, though, doctors said, and there is still much they’re learning about how well transplants work for COVID-19 patients. Learn more here.

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