Survival of Lung Transplantation Patients in Masih Daneshvari Hospital

Introduction & Lung transplantation is the ultimate treatment in many patients with advanced stages of pulmonary disease. Complexity, lack of donors, lack of specialized centers and the cost of the procedure are main barriers for its expansion. Although more than 30 lung transplantation have been done in our country, there is no report about the survival of these patients. We report here the survival rate of the patients who underwent lung transplantation at the research center of Masih Daneshvari Hospital. We used the database of lung transplantation research center of Masih Daneshvari Hospital, Tehran, Iran and extracted all cases of lung transplantation during 2000-2009 periods. Masih Daneshvari Hospital is a university based hospital and is the referral center for lung transplantation. We analyzed the survival of the patients using life table and Kaplan-Meier method. 33 patients underwent lung transplantation during this period. 25 (76%) of them were male and the mean age of patients was 38 ± 15 yr. The causes of transplantation were: pulmonary fibrosis (22, 67%), COPD (5, 15%), bronchiectasis (4, 12%) and cystic fibrosis (2, 6%). Lung transplantation was single-sided in 22 (67%) patients and double-sided 11 (33%) in others. One- and five-year survival of the all patients was 33% and 24%, and the mean and median of patient's survival were 32 and 17 months, respectively. In patients who were alive after two weeks of transplantation, one- and five-year survival were 51% and 36% and the mean and median of patient's survival were 45.8 and 20.8 months, respectively. The patients’ survival was lower at our center than what was reported from other centers. However, when interpreting these results, one should notice that lung transplantation is very young in our center. Most of our transplantations were performed while the center was in learning curve. Also, bad clinical condition and more advance disease-status of the transplanted patients along with patients’ poor education and their low socioeconomic status that made them stop their medications and follow-up, could be the other reasons.