Mette-Marit has received new lungs
The Royal House has announced that Crown Princess Mette-Marit has undergone a successful lung transplant at Rikshospitalet. She will remain in hospital for several weeks of recovery.
June 17, 2026
Crown Princess Mette-Marit. Photo: Dusan Reljin / The Royal Court
A successful operation
On the morning of Wednesday 17 June, the Royal House announced that Crown Princess Mette-Marit has undergone a successful lung transplant at Rikshospitalet, Norway's national hospital, in Oslo. The Crown Prince and Crown Princess thanked the public for the warm greetings of recent weeks, saying the support has meant a great deal in what they described as a demanding situation.
"The lung transplant has so far been successful," said Arnt Fiane, head of the Department of Thoracic Surgery at Rikshospitalet, who thanked everyone on the team involved in planning and carrying out the operation. Like all newly transplanted patients, the Crown Princess will remain in hospital for several weeks. According to Are Holm, head of the Department of Pulmonary Medicine, this is standard procedure: medication must be adjusted, any complications managed and rehabilitation begun.
Crown Prince Haakon will make changes to his own programme in order to be with the Crown Princess during this period. The Royal House said the next update on her condition is planned for when she is discharged from Rikshospitalet, after which a longer period of rehabilitation and training will follow. As a rule, no further updates are expected while that continues.
From the waiting list to the operating table
The announcement comes less than two weeks after the Crown Princess was placed on the lung transplant waiting list on 5 June, when her chronic lung disease was described as life-threatening. Mette-Marit was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis in 2018 — a condition in which healthy lung tissue is gradually replaced by scar tissue, leaving the lungs stiffer and breathing progressively harder. Her health deteriorated sharply over the past year, and her final public appearance before the operation was on the palace balcony on 17 May, where she relied on supplemental oxygen.
Norway has a publicly funded public health service, and lung transplant candidates are prioritised on medical criteria alone, regardless of social standing — so a place on the list never carried any precedence for the Crown Princess. When a donor lung becomes available it is matched by blood group, tissue type and size, and offered to the sickest patient it fits. Only around eight patients are on the national waiting list at any one time, and every such operation is carried out at Rikshospitalet, which performs roughly 30 a year. Donor organs can also come from abroad through the Nordic cooperation Scandiatransplant.
A list under scrutiny
The waiting list itself has been the subject of Society and Politics' own reporting. Our investigation documented that the approximate upper age limit for lung transplantation was quietly lowered from 65 to 60 last October, at the same time as the number of patients on the list fell sharply — a change never announced publicly through any channel other than the hospital's internal handbook. Decisions of this kind determine who is admitted to the list in the first place, and for severely ill patients left outside it they can be a matter of life and death.
An extraordinary period for the family
The transplant caps a turbulent stretch for the royal family. Only two days before the operation was announced, the Crown Princess's eldest son, Marius Borg Høiby, was sentenced to four years in prison by Oslo District Court for two rapes and a string of other offences. He had earlier sought release from custody, citing his mother's serious illness, but the court of appeal kept him in detention.The road ahead remains demanding. Doctors at Rikshospitalet have been candid that the period after a lung transplant carries real risk: roughly one in eight patients does not survive the first year, and about half are alive after ten. Recipients must take immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their lives and guard carefully against infection, because the new lung remains a foreign body. Even so, many regain normal lung function within six to twelve months and return to ordinary daily life — and in that, the doctors stress, there is genuine hope.
SOURCES
The Royal House of Norway
The Crown Princess has undergone a lung transplantAftenposten
Crown Princess Mette-Marit has received new lungs