Smokers Can Be Good Lung Donors
By: Big 2 News Staff
Updated: January 31, 2013
You might think that heavy smokers make for bad lung donors.
But a new a study finds donors who smoked more than a pack of cigarettes a day for more than 20 years were strong candidates for double lung transplant donors.
The study was presented this week at the annual Society of Thoracic Surgeons meeting.
The authors looked at 5900 adult double lung transplants between 2005 and 2011.
They found that the patients who received lungs from smokers had similar short and medium term survival rates as those who received lungs from people who did not smoke heavily.
