BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE A handful of studies have reported that bronchoscopies influence the clinical outcome of mechanically ventilated patients with aspiration pneumonia. The purpose of the present study is to elucidate the therapeutic role of early bronchoscopy in patients with aspiration who are mechanically ventilated. METHODS A retrospective cohort study was conducted via medical recor...

Introduction Dysphagia is a risk factor for aspiration pneumonia and acute respiratory failure in acute stroke patients. Dysphagia lusoria is caused by compression on the esophagus from artery lusoria, when the aberrant right subclavian artery arises from the descending aortic arch. We present a rare case report of pre-stroke undiagnosed dysphagia lusoria as a cause of aspiration pneumonia with...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to report preliminary long-term outcomes after supratracheal laryngectomy (STL). METHODS Twenty-two male patients who underwent STL were involved in this study. Swallowing skills, neoglottis motility, and vibrations were videoendoscopically assessed. Aerodynamic measures, spectrogram analysis, aspiration pneumonia, body weight variations, and voice per...

The aim of this study was to assess the accuracy of protected telescoping catheter performed using: 1) protected distal aspiration, or 2) protected mini-bronchoalveolar lavage for the diagnosis of ventilator-associated bacterial pneumonia. Twenty-seven patients who died after receiving mechanical ventilation for at least 72 h were included in a comparative prospective post-mortem study. The two...

Introduction: Foreign-body aspiration is still considered one of the most important diagnostic and therapeutic issues for physicians. Mortality rates and the prevalence of diseases caused by foreign bodies in the airway are higher in children because of the relatively narrow airway and immature protective mechanisms. The aim of this study was to study the pattern of foreign-body aspiration in t...

BACKGROUND The reflex cough test is useful for detecting silent aspiration, a risk factor for aspiration pneumonia. However, assessing the risk of aspiration pneumonia requires measuring not only the cough reflex but also cough strength. Currently, no reflex cough testing device is available that can directly measure reflex cough strength. We therefore developed a new testing device that can ea...

Background: Post-stroke dysphagia leads to increased risk of aspiration and subsequent higher pneumonia. It is important not only diagnose post-stroke early but also evaluate the protective mechanism that counteracts aspiration, i.e., primarily cough. The aim this study was investigate predictive value cough frequency in addition for pneumonia outcome. Methods: This a single-center prospective ...

Oropharyngeal dysphagia, typically associated with older adults, represents a spectrum of swallowing disorders with potentially serious complications and a negative impact on quality of life. A major complication of dysphagia is caused by aspiration, predominantly of thin liquids, which may cause aspiration pneumonia. Given that thin liquids are typically aspirated, the conventional therapy inv...

Huntington’s disease (HD) is a progressive neurodegenerative autosomal dominant disease characterized by choreatic and hypokinetic movements, disturbed behaviour, and cognitive decline. Pneumonia is the most common cause of death, followed by cardiovasculair diseases. It has been suggested that choking is the causative underlying factor for pneumonia in HD. As a detailed specification of the ty...

Background and Purpose—We sought to evaluate the efficacy of testing the laryngeal cough reflex in identifying pneumonia risk in acute stroke patients. Methods—We performed a prospective study of 400 consecutive acute stroke patients examined using the reflex cough test (RCT) compared with 204 consecutive acute stroke patients from a sister facility examined without using the RCT. The binary en...