Fig. 5

Cumulative incidence of bronchiolitis obliterans syndrome (BOS) and mortality after lung transplantation (LTx) for the two different time periods 1990–2002 and 2003–2014. Our findings (Fig. 1) indicate that DLTx and SLTx carried the same risk of developing BOS grade ≥ 2, but DLTx had a significantly lower risk of death. We suspect that these results might reflect a change in postoperative care towards more aggressive infection and rejection therapy in combination with less frequent SLTx in favor of DLTx the last 10–12 years. However, our results could not confirm these suppositions: no difference was found between the risk of developing BOS grade ≥ 2 or death in different time periods. In Fig. 5 we show the results, supporting the claim that DLTx has a significantly lower risk of death compared to SLTx