Measuring the quality of life before and after bilateral lung transplantation in patients with cystic fibrosis.

Lung transplantation is an important topic today in healthcare policy because the technique is new and costly. One of the important issues in the evaluation of lung transplantation is quality of life. The quality of life after lung transplantation must be relatively high compared with other forms of medical care to legitimize the high costs of transplantation. Quantifying the quality of life after lung transplantation and other medical therapies is possible with general measurements of quality of life. In a pilot study of six patients with cystic fibrosis, the quality of life, both before and after lung transplantation, was measured by the following five instruments: (1) standard gamble, (2) time trade-off, (3) the Karnofsky performance status, (4) the EuroQol visual analog scale, and (5) the Nottingham health profile. This pilot study demonstrates that the introduced methodology is feasible. The preliminary results suggest that the improvement in quality of life for patients with cystic fibrosis after bilateral lung transplantation is comparable to the improvement in quality of life after heart transplantation.