Revue des maladies respiratoires
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A 49-year-old man with disseminated histoplasmosis (pulmonary and central nervous system involvement) successfully treated with ketoconazole and fluconazole combination is reported. Histoplasma capsulatum infection of the central nervous system is extremely rare in France partly because the organism is not endemic. Oral treatment with newer triazoles may be useful for central nervous system histoplasmosis, but additional information is needed to establish their effectiveness.
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Decision analysis has greatly benefited to the field of pulmonary embolism diagnosis, by allowing the theoretical assessment of potential novel strategies, which could in turn be validated in clinical trials. The adjunction of clinical probability assessment, plasma D-dimer measurement, and lower limb venous compression ultrasonography, to pulmonary scintigraphy and angiography in the diagnostic workup, results in a considerable reduction in the requirement for angiography. ⋯ Finally, spiral CTscan combined with D-dimer and ultrasonography could also prove highly cost-effective, and replace either pulmonary angiography, or even both lung scan and angiography, if ongoing studies confirm the promising preliminary results obtained with CTscan. However, such a conclusion awaits the validation of algorithms including CTscan by clinical outcome trials, in which the therapeutic decision would rest on the result of the spiral CTscan.
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Numerous acute and chronic neuromuscular disorders may induce an acute ventilatory failure. The latter is sometimes triggered by a complication like a bronchial aspiration, a pneumonia, or an atelectasis. ⋯ Four different clinical presentations are depicted in this review: slowly progressive (Duchenne muscular dystrophy), rapidly progressive (Guillain-Barré syndrome), chronic with exacerbations (myasthenia gravis), and a form consecutive to critical care (critical care polyneuropathy and myopathy). For each type of ventilatory failure, the review discusses the preventive surveillance, the treatment of acute respiratory failure, and the long-term management.
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The involvement of the apical pleura is infrequent in diffuse pleural thickening secondary to asbestos exposure. Most often diffuse pleural thickening is accompanied by an obliteration of the costophrenic angle and the posterior and paraspinous pleural surfaces of the pleura are involved to the greatest extent. ⋯ Apical pleural thickening with upper lobe changes in asbestos-exposed persons should be regarded as due to the asbestos exposure, after exclusion of other causes like tuberculosis and the apex tumors. Usually the evolution of the lesions is slowly progressive over several years or even decade, and results in mild restrictive defect.
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Computed tomography, and particularly high-resolution computed tomography, allows a detailed exploration of the pulmonary parenchyma. We discuss here work on the use of this technique in the diagnosis and quantification of pulmonary emphysema. ⋯ We summarize our work which has demonstrated. 1) that the relative surface with density below -950 Hounsfield units and measured on millimetric tomographic slices obtained at the end of maximal inspiration is a valuable measurement of the extent of the macroscopic emphysema and reflects the microscopic emphysema; 2) that subjective quantification overestimates minimally extensive emphysema and shows important intra- and inter-operator variability; 3) that indexes derived from computed tomographic images acquired at the end of expiration reflect more the obstructive syndrome than emphysematous destruction; 4) that age and the size of the lungs influence computed tomographic measurements while hyperinflation appears to have no effect. Finally, we present an example of recent work applying the computed tomographic technique.