ABSTRACT
Perhaps no surgical innovation has ever deserved a chapter on controversies as much as lung volume reduction surgery (LVRS), which was first described in 1959 by Brantigan et al. (1) from the University of Maryland. The method never caught on, because objective selection criteria, pulmonary function, and exercise testing were not reported, and perhaps in part because of opposition by prominent pulmonologists. Nonetheless, their patients appeared to demonstrate functional improvement, albeit at a fairly high perioperative mortality (16%).
