Thoracic Surgery – notes for its history in Brazil (Part II): Lung transplantation

Abstract

Pulmonary transplantation arrived in Brazil after being well grounded in operative technique, in the use of anti-rejection drugs, as well as advances in pulmonary preservation, allowing longer ischemia time with less reperfusion injury. Consistent with this fact, there was advancement in understanding the mechanism of rejection and infection.

The first Brazilian pulmonary transplant occurred in Porto Alegre, in May 1989. It was also the first in Latin America. The author was José de Jesus Peixoto Camargo, surgeon at the Pereira Filho Pavilion of the Santa Casa of Porto Alegre. It was a 27-year-old man, suffering from bronchiolitis obliterans, who received a left lung transplant and survived more than nine years, dying from infectious complications resulting from bronchiolitis and bronchiectasis, associated with pulmonary tuberculosis that he developed eight years after the transplant.

From then on, more Brazilian centers created transplant programs. The implementation of each service incorporated infrastructure that guaranteed multidisciplinary care. The emphasis of these programs was due to: care for the donor, selection of recipients, adequate rehabilitation of candidates during the waiting time, anesthetic and surgical training in the management of pertinent technical peculiarities, highly qualified intensive care, and follow-up of a regulated, inflexible, and permanent postoperative protocol. Thus, one understands how we arrived at the current moment to be reported in the form of history.

The historiographic material (method) collected by the authors was based on reading scientific texts, informative materials, and oral reports. It follows the methodological line of the previous article(Part I) whose events served to build the history of the specialty in Brazil, under the pioneering work of José de Jesus Peixoto Camargo.