Recent trends in lung transplantation: the University of Minnesota experience

The number of transplants performed at our center continues to grow--partly as a result of the use of expanded donors and partly as a result of referrals from programs that have closed. We also anticipate having a more active living-donor lobar transplant program. The major acute problems that we encounter after transplantation are reperfusion injury and pneumonia. Improvements in perioperative mortality and morbidity will come with better lung preservation techniques and with an improved understanding of and an ability to modify the reperfusion process. BOS continues to be a major long-term problem for lung transplant patients. Although we do not understand the underlying pathogenesis of BOS, we are optimistic that BOS-free survival rates will increase with improvements in our ability to detect acute rejection as well as by avoidance of chronic injury to the lung from processes like GERD. Ongoing genetic analysis being conducted at our center will likely provide information about important biomarkers that define these processes.