ABSTRACT
I. Background Lung transplantation offers the potential to improve both survival and quality of life (QOL) for select patients with advanced lung diseases. Although improvement in healthrelated quality of life (HRQOL) is generally accepted as an important patient-centered outcome, the current lung allocation system does not include QOL as one of the variables in determining “transplant benefit” and calculation of the lung allocation score (LAS) (1). This omission reflects the general perception in the transplant community that prolonging survival should be the primary objective of transplantation. The absence of methodologically sound studies in the lung transplant literature from which QOL can accurately be quantified reinforces the notion that QOL is an important but secondary objective.
