Science / Medicine : Lung Transplant Survival Rate Up

Survival rates for lung transplant patients are soaring as surgeons adopt techniques developed during the last decade by a group of doctors in St. Louis. Surgeon Joel D. Cooper and his colleagues at Washington University reported last week in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. that single-lung recipients had a 90% survival rate using the procedure. The survival rate was 82% for those who received two lungs.

Those rates approach the one-year survival rate of 85% to 90% for heart transplants, a less complicated and more widely performed operation, said Dr. Bartley Griffith, a heart-lung transplant surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The one-year survival rate for lung transplants at most hospitals, including Pittsburgh, is 75% to 80%, Griffith said.

Doctors previously assumed that a heart weakened by lung disease would have to be transplanted along with the lung, Cooper said.