The surgical management of bullous emphysema

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 of the Lung

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...

Functional results of surgery for bullous emphysema.

Forty-six patients with bullous emphysema were operated on. Respiratory function was investigated before and immediately after surgery, and during the follow-up to five years. The larger the volume of the bullae, the less disturbances of lung function caused by their removal immediately after operation. Respiratory function improved significantly during the long-term follow-up after removal of ...

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...