Bullous Emphysema

Bullous lung disease or bullous emphysema?

Bullous lung disease is an entity characterized by the presence of bullae in one or both the lung fields, with normal intervening lung.1,2 On the other hand, bullous emphysema is the presence of bullae in a patient with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and is characterized by the presence of centrilobular emphysema in the nonbullous lung.3–5 To select patients who are more likely t...

Bullous Emphysema of the Lung

Bullous emphysema versus diffuse emphysema: a functional and radiologic comparison.

The contribution of bullous emphysema (BE) to the functional impairment of patients with concomitant diffuse emphysema (DE) and the confounding effects of BE on functional measurements were investigated. Twenty-nine patients (Group I), with BE and DE were compared with a group of patients without BE matched, among other criteria, for radiographic extent of DE (Group II). Group I showed signific...

The surgical considerations of bullous emphysema.

Increasing surgical interest in bullous emphysema has been manifest in recent years. Justification for surgery in many series of cases has been vague but there is more and more agreement on the necessity for considering an increasing number of these patients for surgery. The first American reference on this subject was in 1925 when Koontz reviewed the literature and collected 105 cases. The sur...

Bullous emphysema – Not always nicotine-related!

In a patient admitted for further investigation of haemoptysis and dyspnoea and known emphysema of the lung, a remarkable distribution of emphysematous bullae could be detected on CT-imaging. Further history, besides smoking, revealed apnoea diving-activity during younger adult age. The distinct appearance of partially septated pleura-based bullae lead to the suspicion of a positive-pressure ba...