Breathing is a basic physiologic function, and acute dyspnea is one of the most frightening human experiences. It might be thought to be abnormal for a patient suffering an acute attack of asthma not to feel at least somewhat afraid. Asthmatic patients suffering from anxiety disorders usually hyperventilate, and many of them report phobic avoidance [...]
A further biologic factor that may cause anxiety may occur if hyperventilation and panic are misconstrued as being indicative of a worsening of the patients respiratory disorder. If this happens, then dosages of asthma medications may be inappropriately increased which in the case of methylxanthines and p2-adrener- gic agonists are likely to make patients physiologically [...]
The Interaction of Medical, Psychologic, and Social Issues in Asthma and Their Effect on Levels of Individual Disability Asthma and the anxiety disorders are separate autonomous medical conditions. The relatively common occurrence, however, of anxiety disorders in asthmatics and in patients with other forms of chronic respiratory disease has been well documented, as has the [...]
Despite considerable debate, the most accepted definition of asthma is that it is a disorder of the respiratory tract, characterized by a hyperreactive bronchial tree, producing episodes of reversible airway obstruction. Gross, in a discussion on the problems of defining asthma, quoted Permutt as stating “asthma is like love, we all know what it is [...]
Routine chest roentgenograms following TBB rarely demonstrate a pneumothorax in patients without both chest pain and fluoroscopic findings of a pneumothorax. In no instance did any of the 305 routine chest roentgenograms obtained after TBB reveal an unsuspected pneumothorax. The two pneumothoraces which did occur were immediately diagnosed in the bronchoscopy suite by symptoms and [...]
There were 190 men and 115 women studied with a mean age of 51 years (range 18 to 87). Two of these patients had bronchoscopy and TBB during mechanical ventilation. Of the 305 patients, 146 had spirometry performed at the University of Virginia. Forty-one of these 146 patients (28 percent) had findings on spirometry of [...]
Transbronchial biopsy via the flexible fiberoptic bronchoscope is a common procedure in pulmonary medicine. Because pneumothorax is a recognized complication of this procedure, most bronchosco- pists routinely obtain chest roentgenograms after TBB. However, the proportion of these routine chest x-ray films which demonstrate an unsuspected pneumothorax is unknown. We hypothesized that routine post- biopsy chest [...]
