Breathing Easier

Reported August 2005

BALTIMORE (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- Transplant surgery is always risky. Not just the surgery, but also living life after a transplant. A new treatment is helping some patients live longer, healthier lives.

Before Esther Suss received her lung transplant, late-stage emphysema -- a lung disease -- had her catching her breath. "I couldn't walk five blocks to go to lunch without having to use the oxygen," she says. "Even then I would be exhausted." Surviving several years after surgery, Suss is beating the odds, doing absolutely great.

Pulmonologist Aldo Iacono, M.D., of the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, says her success could be a result of a new inhaled form of a commonly used anti-rejection drug called cyclosporine. He says it improves survival five-fold.

After transplant surgery, the body can refuse the new lung in a condition called chronic rejection. But inhaling the drug has now been shown to halt this fatal condition in some patients. When it's taken orally, it has to be absorbed by the blood and circulated through the body. But after inhaling the drug, it's delivered directly into tiny airways critical for breathing. The inhaled medicine is a faster, more precise way of taking the anti-rejection medication.

Dr. Iacono says, "This should be a drug that provides substantial benefit to patients."

That's good news for Suss. "I got my life back, and it was worth it." She plans on breathing easier with her family for many more years.

Clinical trial results showed patients on the inhaled drug have an 84-percent better chance at surviving four years after surgery. For more information about the lung transplant program at the University of Maryland Medical Center, call (800) 492-5538 or visit
http://www.umm.edu.

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Kathleen Harrison
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(415) 318-4154



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