Curēus
-
Case Reports
The Effervescent Gallbladder: An Emergency Medicine Bedside Ultrasound Diagnosis of Emphysematous Cholecystitis.
Emphysematous cholecystitis (EC) is a distinct clinical disease that carries a high rate of morbidity and mortality. Maintaining a high index of suspicion, especially in the right patient population, combined with emergency bedside ultrasound can lead to rapid diagnosis and initiation of treatment for this life threatening condition.
-
Case Reports
Microvascular Decompression for a Patient with a Glossopharyngeal Neuralgia: A Technical Note.
The glossopharyngeal neuralgia (GPN) constitutes approximately 0.2-1.3% of all facial pain syndromes. The GPN is a syndrome of neuropathic pain characterized by paroxysmal pain episodes localized in the posterior tongue, tonsil, throat, or external ear canal. The first-line treatment is pharmacological. Patients who are refractory to medical therapy can be treated surgically with microvascular decompression (MVD) or sectioning the IX nerve and the upper rootlets of the X nerve. We aim to describe the technical nuances of MVD of the IX cranial nerve with a targeted inferior mini-craniotomy in a patient with a neurovascular compression.
-
Pulmonary embolism continues as a very common and also presumably life-threatening disorder. For affected individuals with intermediate- as well as high-risk pulmonary embolism, catheter-based revascularization procedures have developed a possible substitute for systemic thrombolysis or for surgical embolectomy. Ultrasound-assisted catheter-directed thrombolysis is an innovative catheter-based approach; which is the main purpose of the present review article. ⋯ However, a direct comparison of ultrasound-assisted thrombolysis with systemic thrombolysis or surgical thrombectomy is not available. Ultrasound-assisted thrombolysis with early intrapulmonary thrombolytic bolus could also be successful in high-risk patients, but unfortunately, data from randomized trials is limited. This review article recapitulates existing information on ultrasound-assisted thrombolysis for acute pulmonary embolism.
-
Introduction Brain death (BD) is the irreversible termination of the functioning of the brain. The diagnosis should be first made by clinical criteria and confirmed by using paraclinical confirmatory techniques (ancillary tests). While conventional brain angiography remains the standard method of choice, computed tomography angiography (CTA) has emerged as an alternative method. ⋯ Moreover, no opacification was observed in the internal cerebral veins (ICVs) or great cerebral vein (GCV). Conclusion The accuracy rate of CTA in the detection of intracranial circulatory arrest was 100%. CTA examinations confirmed BD diagnoses in all patients who had clinical and EEG BD diagnoses, and no confliction between CTA findings and clinical diagnoses was observed.
-
Baastrup's disease or "kissing spines syndrome" was first described as a cause of lumbar pain before computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanning existed. The diagnosis was based on x-ray studies, which showed that the spinous processes, especially in the lower lumbar spine, became approximated to each other and this was a generator of positional back pain. ⋯ Ligamentous stenosis and anterolisthesis would be the expected pathology with deterioration of these ligaments and were initially described on CT and MRI in patients with symptoms similar to Baastrup's disease as isolated individual case reports. This review will highlight the relationship between the various clinical presentations, biomechanics, and overlap of Baastrup's disease with interspinous bursitis, segmental stenosis, and instability, presenting them as a disease continuum rather than as separate disease processes.