Age Limitation To Lung Transplant Recipients. Ethical Aspects

We present a review of bioethical aspects of limiting patients 65 years or older to lung transplantation. Lung transplantation is a therapeutic option in patients with severe advanced respiratory diseases, progressive despite medical treatment to prolong the expected survival. It is an aggressive surgical treatment, and the patient must complete a lifelong immunosuppressive treatment. Given the donor shortage, access to this treatment is regulated by organ transplant societies, which develop patient selection guidelines. One contraindication to transplantation has been the age of 65 years, sustained by the poor results of older patients and following utilitarian bioethics concept. For the time being there is no unified selection criteria to identify older patients susceptible to have a worse outcome after transplantation. Applying a personalist bioethics, we propose to use selection criteria based on frailty scales to identify those frail patients more likely to die after the transplant procedure.