Pneumothorax Following Transbronchial Biopsy: RESULTS
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 obstructive lung disease (ie, FEV1/FVC<70 percent). All patients were able to acknowledge chest pain or other symptoms during the bronchoscopy.
None of the 305 routine chest roentgenograms demonstrated an unsuspected pneumothorax. Two of 305 patients developed a pneumothorax following TBB. Both had immediate pleuritic chest pain and the sudden appearance of a pleural line suggesting lung collapse in the bronchoscopy suite. Therefore, no patient without symptoms and fluoroscopic findings of lung collapse had a pneumothorax demonstrated on the postbiopsy chest roentgenogram. One of these two patients had bullous emphysema and the other had restrictive lung disease due to sarcoidosis.
Chest pain and fluoroscopic findings of lung collapse are rare in the absence of a pneumothorax. Of the 42 patients without a pneumothorax who had these clinical findings documented, only one patient had both chest pain and fluoroscopic findings suggestive of lung collapse.
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