L: What is the life expectancy of PF?

Life expectancy in pulmonary fibrosis varies widely due to the disease’s heterogeneous nature. While average survival for progressive cases is around three to four years without treatment and six to seven years with treatment, individual outcomes can differ greatly. Close monitoring is essential, as each patient’s progression is unique.

 

🎥 Watch the Video: What is the life expectancy of pulmonary fibrosis?

 

Professor Porter discusses the following:

• Can you predict life expectancy in pulmonary fibrosis or IPF?
• What is the life expectancy of progressive pulmonary fibrosis?
• What is the average life expectancy of a pulmonary fibrosis patient?
• How long will I live after a diagnosis of pulmonary fibrosis or idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis?

 

Full Video Transcript

As for life expectancy, as I’ve said, and as you can imagine with such a heterogeneous group of diseases, it’s very hard to know how each specific patient will progress or not. We can see very different outcomes for two patients that appear very similar. At the beginning, one might go for ten years with no progression, and the other might die within one or two years.  So it’s very, very hard to predict.

What we do know is that, in most of the progressive pulmonary fibrosis patients (these are the ones with the most severe pulmonary fibrosis), the average life expectancy without treatment is three or four years, but there is an enormous spread.  On average three or four years without treatment, and with treatment that probably extends to six to seven years. But again, I really have to emphasise that is when you look at the whole population on average – there’ll be some patients that get worse and die much more quickly than that, and there are others that seem to go on for a much, much longer time.

In most cases, we get an idea of outcomes from how patients have previously behaved. So, if you’ve been stable for ten years, it’s highly likely that you’ll be stable for another ten. However, patients do continually surprise us. Equally, if you’ve been getting worse very quickly over the last year, the chances are you’ll continue that trajectory – but not always. So, we have to watch every patient closely and advise each patient as a unique individual.

 

 

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[Video published December 2025]