Traumatic lung pseudocyst is an uncommon lung injury due to closed chest trauma. Four cases are reported; all were male and one was a child. Three cases showed spontaneous resolution of the pseudocyst and in one case, where resolution was slow, lobectomy was carried out at the patient's insistence. Diagnosis poses no serious problems as there is inevitably a history of substantial chest trauma. The chest radiograph shows a characteristic cavitatory lesion. The pseudocysts may be multiple. Tomography may be helpful in diagnosis and computed tomography can be particularly useful in the demonstration of paramediastinal traumatic pseudocysts.Injury to the lung parenchyma caused by nonpenetrating chest trauma is frequently accompanied by pulmonary contusion and intrapulmonary haemorrhage, but the development of a traumatic lung pseudocyst is a rare occurrence.' 3 Although the diagnosis of traumatic lung pseudocyst is easy because of the history of chest trauma,' erroneous or unnecessary treatment might be offered by clinicians who have no knowledge of the condition. We have encountered four cases of traumatic lung pseudocyst in the past three years, three of them adults and one a child; and we report our findings here.
Case reports CASE 1A 53 year old man fell from a height of 3 m during construction work, bruising his right anterior chest wall. The chest radiograph one hour after emergency admission to hospital showed a cavitating lesion in the right lower lung field (figs 1 and 2a). The arterial oxygen tension was 53 mm Hg (7 1 kPa) while he was breathing air. He complained of severe chest pain and had haemoptysis for three days after admission to hospital. No haematological or biochemical abnormalities were revealed and he was treated with oxygen by inhalation (2 litres a minute) for one week. On the seventh hospital day the chest radiograph showed appreciable reduction in size of the cavitating lesion
Thirty three patients aged over 80 years underwent resection for bronchogenic carcinoma. The operations performed were: lobectomy (21), segmentectomy (4), wedge resection (2), pneumonectomy (3), carinal resection (1). In two patients no resection was feasible. Three patients died within two months of surgery. The cumulative five year survival rate was 55%, 79% for patients with stage I carcinoma and 31% for stage III. It is considered that resection has an acceptable outcome in patients over 80 years.
Nineteen surgically treated intrathoracic vagus nerve tumors (16 neurilemmomas, 3 neurofibromas), including three treated by the authors, were reviewed. Tumor resection with vagus nerve amputation was performed in 14 and intracapsular excision without nerve amputation in 3 of the 17 adequately recorded cases. The location of vagus nerve tumor was the left upper mediastinum in 11 patients, almost all of whom were hoarse postoperatively due to sacrifice of the recurrent laryngeal nerve.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.