Donor criteria in lung transplantation: an issue revisited.

The availability of suitable lung donors is the major limitation to increasing the number of lung transplants performed. Donor criteria developed early in the lung transplant era have not been rigorously evaluated. Each of the "standard" lung donor criteria currently in use should be challenged by obtaining, analyzing, and using multicenter data from a well-designed database. Only in this way will our understanding of appropriate lung donor criteria advance and the pool of lungs available for transplantation increase.