Preparing to travel internationally as a post-transplant patient

My wife, Susan, and I have traveled around the world by trains, planes, ships, and automobiles finding new adventures. We are now in Amsterdam — our first international trip since 2019. When I was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) in January 2017, my care team encouraged me…

Almee, a behavioral therapy app designed to help ease anxiety in people with pulmonary fibrosis (PF), has been granted breakthrough device designation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA gives this designation to medical devices that have the potential to provide a more effective treatment or…

Do you have pets? If so, have they been good companions? Following my diagnosis of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) in January 2017, I faced periods of loneliness and isolation. That was especially true during the COVID-19 pandemic. My wife, Susan, has always been a cat person, while…

GRI Bio has been given the green light to begin a Phase 2a clinical trial testing its lead program candidate GRI-0621, a natural killer T-cell (NKT)-targeted therapy, in people with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) in the U.K. The U.K. Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) cleared the…

Five years ago today, the phone rang early in the morning. “We have lungs,” the voice on the other end announced. The first words I heard that day were months in the making. My mom, Holly, had been in the intensive care unit for almost 12 weeks following an…

Solutions are seldom permanent. I want you to let that marinate for a minute. When I learned I had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) in January 2017, I was several months into my diagnostic journey. As I learned more about IPF and patient experiences, I concluded that there wasn’t…

Adults with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) who had greater diversity of mouth bacteria tended to have worse lung function and a higher risk of death than did those with a less diverse bacteria population in their mouths, a new large-scale study shows. Interestingly, however, those with a higher proportion…

Recurrent lung infections are exhausting, both physically and mentally. As a patient living with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a progressive and life-threatening lung disease, respiratory infections have become part of my life. But that doesn’t mean they’re easy to deal with. When I read a fellow columnist’s recent post…

The journey of a pulmonary fibrosis patient and a post-transplant patient have one big thing in common: We must take the correct dose of the proper medications at the appropriate time. So what happens when much of the pharmacy infrastructure fails on a random weekday? Medication management is…

Acute exacerbations, or sudden bouts of symptom worsening, increase the mortality risk after lung transplantation in people with interstitial lung diseases (ILDs), including idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a study reports. While a lung transplant is considered an effective treatment for ILDs, these findings “suggest that caution is required during decision-making,…