OBJECTIVES: Few studies have evaluated trends among inpatients with cystic fibrosis. The purpose of this paper is to explore patient demographics, diagnosis, and procedures to gather a general picture of cystic fibrosis treatment. Exploration of the cystic fibrosis data set to find trends among the variables, race, gender, mortality, total charges, length of stay, age diagnosis, and procedures provides insight into better methods to treat individuals with cystic fibrosis. METHODS: The data used were taken from the National Inpatient Sample (NIS). The cystic fibrosis data set was formed by isolating the NIS patients diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, using a 10% sample from 2004. The cystic fibrosis data set contained 1582 observations.  Descriptive statistics were used to examine the data; chi-square tests and logistic regressions were employed to analyze the data. RESULTS: Statistics showed that patients with a longer length of stay were more likely to die during hospitalization and to be older. Most races had two high density ages; one around 20 years of age and the other around 60 years of age with the exception of African Americans and Native Americans. The three procedures: transfusion of packed cells (ICD-9 99.04), continuous ventilation <96 consecutive hours (ICD-9 96.71), and endotracheal tube insertion (ICD-9 96.04) and two diagnoses pneumonia (ICD-9 486) and amyloidosis (ICD-9 277.3, accumulate deposits of abnormal proteins) were found to be directly related to mortality. The data also showed that none of the patients with esophageal reflux (ICD-9 530.81) died during hospitalization. CONCLUSIONS: From the results, older patients, patients with long lengths of stay, or those diagnosed with amyloidosis could be considered high-risk for hospital mortality. However, these results are limited; no information about outpatient factors, medications, or test results could be assessed. Also, there were few patients who died during hospitalization on which to base the analysis.