Respiratory Institute Outcomes

Cleveland Clinic is one of the busiest lung transplant centers in the world, performing 593 lung transplants from 2016 through 2020. Cleveland Clinic surgeons performed 118 lung transplant procedures in 2020.

Cleveland Clinic surgeons perform lung transplant procedures for patients with a variety of lung diseases. In this reporting period (July 1, 2019 through June 30, 2020), the majority (55.1%) of the 107 lung recipients had idiopathic pulmonary arterial hypertension.

The 1-year graft and patient survival rates at Cleveland Clinic were slightly below the expected level.

The median wait time for a lung transplant at Cleveland Clinic was 2.9 months for the candidates wait-listed from July 1, 2014 through December 31, 2019. This is slightly higher than the average wait time 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 has an aggressive posture toward evaluating and listing extremely sick and high-risk candidates. Cleveland Clinic evaluates donor organs and utilizes advanced strategies such as Ex Vivo Lung Perfusion (EVLP) to make more donor lungs available for transplant. The wait-list mortality rate during this period was higher than expected.