Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) has become an increasingly important technique for patients with respiratory or cardiac failure for a variety of causes. In addition, there are many reports about the use of ECMO in surgical operation on neonates and children patients with tracheal obstruction. In this report we present a case about an adult patient who underwent a carinal resection an...

From 1978 to 1982 365 patients were treated surgically for bronchial carcinoma. Lobectomy was performed in 250 and pneumonectomy in 115. Sixteen (4.4%) needed mechanical ventilation for acute respiratory failure. Six out of eight with a lobectomy, but only two out of eight with a pneumonectomy, survived initially. Of these eight survivors, five died from recurrent malignancy within a year but t...

Repair of scimitar syndrome presenting in infancy involves either tunneling or reimplantation of the anomalous vein to the left atrium and may be fraught with serious complications such as thrombosis and secondary pulmonary infarction necessitating pneumonectomy. The authors present the case of a severely symptomatic infant with scimitar syndrome, managed initially with closure of an atrial sep...

Bronchial stump reinforcement with viable tissue after pneumonectomy is an important prophylactic measure against the development of bronchopleural fistula. We present our technique of utilizing the pericardium on the posterior wall of the left atrium as a flap to cover the bronchial stump after extrapleural pneumonectomy. From January 1999 to March 2008, we used this technique in 50 patients (...

Guidelines regarding operability of patients with lung cancer are well established. The measured and predicted pulmonary function provides a practical guide to the safety of lobectomy or pneumonectomy. We describe a patient who had an unexplained precipitous fall in preoperative FEV(1) that would have precluded a required pneumonectomy but for an urgent ventilation-perfusion (V/Q) scan. This ca...

Recurrence in the contralateral lung of patients who have undergone pneumonectomy for lung cancer is often not surgically treatable. Percutaneous radiofrequency ablation (RFA) of tumours is an emerging minimally invasive technique which has recently been used in the treatment of lung cancer. The case history is presented of a patient who had previously undergone pneumonectomy in whom recurrence...

We report on a 42-year-old female who underwent right pneumonectomy for hemoptysis from an aspergilloma cavity. Several years postoperatively she complained of increasing shortness of breath, wheezing, and dyspnea upon exertion. Chest computed tomography showed a counterclockwise rotation of the mediastinum with obstruction of the left lower lobe bronchus. Minimally invasive repair was carried ...

Postoperative pulmonary oedema occurs early post-operatively (>6 h) and is associated with a net fluid overload. A recent survey of 8,195 major operations showed an incidence of 7.6%, with a mortality of 11.9% [1]. Post-pneumonectomy pulmonary oedema (PPO) occurs after pneumonectomy [2] or lung resection [3], in the absence of left ventricular dysfunction or infection. The overall incidence is ...

Abstract A 32–year–old non–smoker Asian female was admitted to the Emergency Department San Salvatore Hospital of L‘Aquila experiencing worsening dyspnea. Three months earlier patient had undergone left pneumonectomy. An arterial blood gas analysis performed on air reported: pH 7.53, pCO2 23.7 mmHg, pO2 38.7 SpO2 80%. Blood tests were within normal limits, except for a moderate increase in D–Di...

We report the case of a 61 yr old male, who developed a severe right-to-left shunt through a patent foramen ovale, in the absence of elevated right-sided heart pressures, two months after a left-sided pneumonectomy. This is considered to be a rare complication after pneumonectomy. However, taking into account the approximately 20% incidence of patent foramen ovale in the general population, we ...