The amount of patients having undergone lung transplantations has increased by roughly 20% over the past five years. For those suffering during the end stage of various lung diseases, transplantation can provide a prolongation and quality improvement of life as the last remaining treatment option.

Marc Hartert and his team of colleagues have researched the condition of patients following their lung transplant, and the findings are published in the current edition of the Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2014; 111(7): 107–16).

They write that deaths in the 90 days after a lung transplantation surgery have decreased over the past 25 years from 19.4 percent to 10 percent. 

Despite this being a positive development, serious complications still affect many patients: about 3 percent have an acute transplant rejection reaction, while almost 30 percent are diagnosed with chronic rejection symptoms. Conditions such as airway complications, transplant failure and other serious problems are frequently a result of the transplantation, and oftentimes they appear elsewhere in the body, not just in the lungs.

In order to achieve an improvement in longer-term results following lung transplantation, the team of researchers suggest enhanced collaboration between the transplantation centers and the local doctors and hospitals attended by patients for their ongoing aftercare.

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6 March 2014

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Lung, transplantation, organ transplantation, lung transplant The amount of patients having undergone lung transplantations has increased by roughly 20% over the past five years. For those suffering during the end sta...