Respiratory Institute Outcomes

Cleveland Clinic is one of the busiest lung transplant centers in the world, performing 551 lung transplants from 2014 through 2018. Cleveland Clinic surgeons performed 113 lung transplant procedures in 2018.

Cleveland Clinic surgeons perform lung transplant procedures for patients with a variety of lung disease. In this period, the majority (61.3%) of the 411 lung transplant candidates had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

The 1-month and 1-year rates of graft survival and patient survival at Cleveland Clinic were better than expected.

The wait time for a lung transplant at Cleveland Clinic was 3.5 months (median time to transsplant) in 2108. This is slightly higher than the average wait times at other centers in the region and throughout the US. Most patients at Cleveland Clinic receive a transplant very quickly, but many have conditions that make it difficult to find suitable organs, thereby increasing the median wait time.

Cleveland Clinic strives to offer life-saving lung transplantation to as many patients as possible, and to achieve the best outcomes possible for patients waiting for the procedure. Because of an aggressive posture toward evaluating and listing extremely sick and high-risk candidates on the wait-list, Cleveland Clinic’s wait-list mortality rate in this period is higher than expected.