A 23-year-old male homosexual smoker was well until Jan 22, 1988 when he presented with diffuse PCP Symptomatic and radiographic resolution followed standard therapy. Zidovudine and prophylactic aerosolized pentamidine (150 mg every two weeks via a Respigard II nebulizer) were taken for two months. Four months later, recurrent diffuse PCP was treated with aerosolized pentamidine [...]
Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) occurs in approximately 70 percent of patients with the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Its typical radiographic presentation is of bilateral diffuse interstitial infiltrates. Pneumothorax as a complication of AIDS-related PCP has been reported only 15 times.
Cross-sectional echocardiography is a useful noninvasive method for diagnosing both intracardiac and extracardiac masses, including mediastinal cysts and tumors, pericardial cysts and tumors, intrathoracic neoplasms, and left ventricular pseudoaneu- rysms. Although atelectatic segments of lung are encountered frequently during routine echocardiography studies, this entity has not been described well in the literature. Furthermore, these lung [...]
Clinical Follow-up Several months following discharge from the hospital, the patient was again admitted with progressive dyspnea, orthopnea, and pedal edema. An echocardiogram (Fig 1С) obtained at the time of this hospital admission revealed recurrence of the left pleural effusion with reappearance of the atelectatic lung segment along the lateral aspect of the left ventricle. [...]
The diagnosis of extracardiac tumors is an important clinical application of the cross-sectional echocardiographic technique. In the present report we describe a unique series of patients who, during routine echocardiographic examination, were each noted to have a large echo-dense extracardiac mass adherent to the lateral aspect of the left ventricle. Although an extracardiac tumor was [...]
Other studies warrant brief discussion for the sake of completeness. In a retrospective analysis of 123 patients with spinal cord injury, Reines and Harris found that respiratory complications (atelectasis and pneumonia) occurred during the first month of hospi-talization in 35.7 percent of patients. Among a sub-group of 20 patients treated with the RRKTT, however, the [...]
We showed that continuous postural oscillation decreased the incidence of LRTI and pneumonia and shortened the median hospital stay for victims of nonpenetrating trauma. Patients in the control arm received standard nursing care, including turning from side to side every 2 h (although the efficacy of this effort to turn patients was sometimes compromised by [...]
