Transplant recipients without diabetes are expected to live twice as long as patients with the disease.
The study focused on lung transplant patients over ten years. They found the average survival rate for people with diabetes was five years, compared with ten years for those who did not have the condition.
Diabetic transplant patients are not dying from diabetes-related illnesses, but from bronchiolitis obliterans, which is a form of chronic rejection of the transplanted organ. This suggests that diabetes could be affecting the transplanted lungs and cause them to fail earlier.
Better management of diabetes could lead to greater life expectancy for diabetic transplant patients.
Read more at Monash University