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Lung Transplant Patients Could Add Vitamin D To Their Diet To Improve Their Health

November 1, 2010 by  

Lung transplant patients could add vitamin D to their diet to improve their healthNew research suggests that maintaining a nutritional diet could be even more important for patients who need a lung transplant. The study, conducted by scientists at Loyola University Health System, shows that vitamin D deficiency is associated with an increasing number of lung transplant rejections.

The researchers suggested that when patients are set to undergo lung transplant surgery, they are putting themselves at risk for their body to reject the organ. For the study, 122 patients who had received this surgery were examined over a three-year period. Each of the subject's vitamin D levels were checked once the transplant was complete.

In their findings, the investigators discovered that half of the participants were vitamin D deficient, while it was unknown for another 32 percent. The deficiency was also prevalent among the patients whose bodies rejected the new organ.

The researchers concluded that vitamin D may help the immune system tolerate the organ. As a result, lung transplant patients could improve their health by adding this nutrient to their diet.

According to the scientists, vitamin D could also help to reduce the risk for developing other problems such as cancer, heart disease, depression, diabetes or osteoporosis. 

Filed Under: Alternative Medicine, Liberty News
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  • DeJay

    Is there any therapy for lungs to ease breathing? A couple of reports I’ve read where it takes a certain amount of time for the body to ocmpletely regenerate organs. I’m not sure how exact I remember but it’s something like 7 days for the skin to rejuvenate, 7 weeks for the liver and 4 months for the lungs. It has been proven about the first two but the lungs have me skeptical. I have COPD with emphesemaa and some success has been reported with the use of adult stem cells. I and many others would appreciate any information about lung health.

  • coal miner

    An inhaled anti-rejection drug can dramatically improve survival after a lung transplant, according to a study conducted at the University of Pittsburgh and led by lung disease specialists who are now at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. The results of the study are published in the January 12, 2006 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

    The study, which was the first double-blind, placebo-controlled trial ever conducted in lung transplant patients, tested an inhaled form of cyclosporine, a widely used medicine to prevent organ rejection following a transplant. The study, conducted from 1998 to 2001, was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health.

    “Inhaled cyclosporine is the first drug ever to show a decline in the incidence of chronic rejection–the leading cause of death following a lung transplant,” says lead author Aldo T. Iacono, M.D., medical director of lung transplantation at the University of Maryland Medical Center and associate professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

    “In our study, the patients who took the inhaled cyclosporine had a two-thirds reduction in chronic rejection compared to those who had the placebo,” says Dr. Iacono. “The risk of death, adjusting for all other variables, was five times greater in the group of patients who took the placebo than among those on the inhaled cyclosporine,” he adds.

    The study included 56 people who had received either a single or a double lung transplant. Within one month following their transplants, they were randomly assigned to take either the inhaled cyclosporine or an inhalable placebo along with traditional anti-rejection therapy. The patients took the inhaled drugs at home three times a week and were followed by the researchers for at least two years.

    “The results of this study are exceedingly important for lung transplant patients,” says Bartley Griffith, M.D., professor of surgery and chief of the Division of Cardiac Surgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

    “Conventional anti-rejection drugs, which are given orally, do not get into the small air sacs of the lungs where chronic rejection takes place. It just makes a lot more sense to give a higher concentration of the drug right into the area you are trying to treat. Organ-specific immune suppression is almost a new paradigm for transplantation,” according to Dr. Griffith, who is also director of Heart and Lung Transplantation at the University of Maryland Medical Center and the senior author of the article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Of the 26 patients in the study who received the inhaled cyclosporine, 23 were still alive two years later. However, of the 30 patients in the placebo group, only 16 were alive at the two-year point. The researchers report that the death rate in the cyclosporine group was 11 percent during the study compared to 47 percent for the placebo group.

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