ABSTRACT
Modern lung transplantation began with the work of Cooper and colleagues at the University of Toronto in the early 1980s. Although heart-lung transplantation in children had been uncommonly performed in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1980s (1,2), pediatric lung transplantation evolved through the 1990s, so that small but significant numbers of lung transplants were performed in this age group in select centers in North America and Europe. Published reports from a number of centers indicated success in adopting the surgical techniques, immunosuppression, and posttransplant care to younger patients with outcomes comparable to that seen in adults (3-7). There has been and will continue to be a population of infants, children, and adolescents in need of lung transplantation since chronic pulmonary disease and pulmonary vascular disease are among the 10 most common categories of death in childhood despite the prevalence being far lower than that seen in adults (8).
