Introducing pediatric thoracic surgery

Why did we decide to present a focused issue on pediatric thoracic surgery?

The answer is not so easy, because the topic is rare, seldom debated and heterogeneously described in the Literature, moreover it could be somewhat altered by personal opinions of every single reader’s experience.

We would rather start from what pediatric thoracic surgery eventually is: a subspeciality whose aim is to treat a majority of rare conditions and disease dealing with a selected population of patients with peculiar physical and psychological needs.

In the twenty-first century we do believe that these patients should not be treated by general pediatric surgeons alone, thus seriously affecting the possibility of cure.

Children and adolescents are not merely little adults, they surely need to be cured and follow-up in a proper way, however they also have unexpected and sometimes incredible possibilities of recovering and healing, and so they could be considered to be scheduled for ambitious and aggressive multidisciplinary treatments, to be administered in specialized and dedicated institutions.

This is not a book, but a collection of contributions and topics of eminent specialists in the thoracic-surgery field, with the aim to help readers to get introduced and informed about difficulties and variety of conditions treated and to foresee future perspectives.

Acknowledgments

Funding: None.

Footnote

Provenance and peer review: This article was commissioned by the editorial office, Pediatric Medicine for the series “Pediatric Thoracic Surgery”. The article did not undergo external peer review.

Conflicts of Interest: The author has completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form (available at http://dx.doi.org/10.21037/pm.2019.02.03). The series “Pediatric Thoracic Surgery” was commissioned by the editorial office without any funding for sponsorship. PS reports personal fees from Baxter International, outside the submitted work. PS serves as the unpaid Guest Editor of the series and an unpaid editorial board member of Pediatric Medicine from Jul 2018 to Jun 2020. The author has no other conflicts of interest to declare.

Ethical Statement: The authors are accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Open Access Statement: This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits the non-commercial replication and distribution of the article with the strict proviso that no changes or edits are made and the original work is properly cited (including links to both the formal publication through the relevant DOI and the license). See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Paolo Scanagatta