A tension pneumothorax is one of the main causes of cardiac arrest in the initial postoperative period after thoracic surgery. Tension pneumothorax and cardiac herniation must be taken into account in hemodynamically unstable patients after pneumonectomy. We report an unusual case of successful treatment of acute tension pneumothorax following cardiac herniation and intrathoracic bleeding after...

Increased pulmonary vascular pressure and decreased right-ventricular performance may occur following pneumonectomy. Inhaled nitric oxide decreases right-ventricular afterload and improves cardiac index by selectively decreasing pulmonary vascular resistance without causing systemic hypotension. We report the use of inhaled nitric oxide in a patient with acute right-ventricular dysfunction afte...

A synchronous right pneumonectomy and left lung transplantation is reported in a case of asymmetric thorax. An extreme shift of the mediastinum and over distension of the transplanted lung is shown 3 years later. Post pneumonectomy syndrome must be seeking in this alternative technique. q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Are case reports at all relevant and useful? A case report of an unusual case of mesothelioma prompts a discussion and concludes that they do have a role but that their observations and conclusions need to be treated with care.

I read with great interest the paper by Jungraithmayr and colleagues entitled ‘Indications and results of completion pneumonectomy’ [1] and I congratulate them on their results. In a previous paper, my colleagues and I reported our experience with 47 patients who underwent completion pneumonectomy (CP) [2], including patients who underwent CP for early and late complications after a first resec...

OBJECTIVES During the last decades, pneumonectomy has been increasingly seen as a risky procedure, first reserved for tumours not amenable to lobectomy, and now discouraged even in advanced stages of non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Our purpose was to assess the long-term survival following pneumonectomy for NSCLC and its prognostic factors. METHODS We set a retrospective study including e...

Introduction: To investigate postoperative complications and the prognostic risk factors of patients underwent pneumonectomy. Methods: Four hundred and six patients underwent pneumonectomy were subjected to the study. All the clinicopathologic data including age, gender, smoking history, surgical treatment, postoperative complications, tumor staging and the follow-up information were investigat...