Lung Transplantation

The first human lung transplant took place in 1963 and the recipient of the transplant lived only eighteen days.   For the fifteen years that followed there were multiple attempts at performing lung transplants and they failed because of rejection and healing difficulties. However, in the 1980s, a powerful immunosuppressant called cyclosporin, was introduced and other techniques to aid in healing were devised. This enabled the first successful single lung transplant to take place in 1986 at the University of Toronto.

What took twenty-three years to devise has evolved into a procedure that is done about 1,800 times annually in the United States. Statistics of survival rates up to the third year vary depending on the transplant center. For example, the two closest centers to me are the Cleveland Clinic and University of Michigan. The University of Michigan performs about twenty to forty lung transplants a year and have a 90-percent survival rate for the first year while the Cleveland Clinic did 108 lung transplants in 2011 and have a little over an 80-percent survival rate for the first year. However, the Cleveland Clinic is considered an "aggressive, high-risk center" and will take patients over the age of 65, while the University of Michigan will not. So, these conditions must be considered when looking at the numbers.

The median survival rate for double-lung recipients is 6.6 years. Approximately six and a half years. Yes, there are double-lung recipients who live ten years, and some live longer, but it's rare. "Nationwide, only a third of patients live 10 years."

A little over two years is what singer Charity Sunshine Tillemann-Dick got out of her first set of donated lungs. She was on intravenous medicines as early as 2006 for idiopathic pulmonary hypertension and received a double-lung transplant at the Cleveland Clinic in September 2009. By November 2011 she was bed-ridden with an infection and by late December she was back at the Cleveland Clinic. She slipped in and out of consciousness until January 24th, when she was matched with her second set of donated lungs. A year after her first transplant she told her compelling story of being a double-lung recipient on TED talk. She exhibits such a strong spirit and I hope the new lungs work well for her..