David Crosby, longterm liver transplant survivor

As was widely reported, David Crosby, singer and song-writer of the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young died last week. A talented artist, RIP. What caught our attention is the fact that Crosby received a liver transplant in 1994 (to correct liver damage from alcohol and drug misuse) making  him a 29-year survivor of an organ transplant. Thinking about the state of the transplantation field when I was working as a doctoral student in transplantation immunology laboratory in the mid 1980s, I wondered about current data. A Google query lead to this 2022 study of survival of recipients of solid organ transplants in the US and the UK. The authors found that mean survival post-transplant is currently longest for kidney transplants (US: 22.79 years; UK: 26.58 years), followed by liver (US: 20.90 years; UK: 20.38 years), heart (US: 14.82 years; UK: 15.85 years), and lung (US: 9.28 years; UK: 9.21 years). Wow, amazing progress indeed in transplantation medicine.