BackgroundLung volume reduction (LVR) surgery has traditionally been performed as a 1-stage bilateral procedure or staged at predetermined interval. However to maximize the overall benefit we have allowed patient determine timing of further interventions and added endobronchial LVR into protocol. We reviewed long-term outcome.MethodsThree hundred thirty-one procedures were on 254 patients (medi...

OBJECTIVE We prospectively analyzed the surgical and functional results of unilateral thoracoscopic reduction pneumoplasty which we performed by choice in patients with asymmetric emphysema. METHODS Between October 1995 and June 1997, 119 emphysematous patients were examined and 34 were operated upon. Among these, 14 selected patients with asymmetric distribution of emphysema in the lungs und...

Lung volume reduction surgery (LVRS) has emerged as a surgical therapeutic intervention for advanced emphysema. Designed for the relief of dyspnoea, LVRS has been demonstrated to be efficacious in a subset of carefully selected patients. Short-term improvements in dyspnoea are accompanied by improvements in forced expiratory volume in one second ranging 13-96%. Lung volumes likewise improve, wi...

Leakage of air into the interstitial tissues of the lungs of sufficient degree to produce pneumomediastinum and subcutaneous emphysema is an uncommon and potentially fatal complication of bronchial asthma in childhood. Another possibly fatal complication of similar causation is tension pneumothorax. It is possible that interstitial emphysema occurs more frequently in severe asthma and allied st...

However, perceptions from the NETT study influenced the design of subsequent randomised controlled trials with endobronchial valves [7, 8] . The inclusion and exclusion criteria were similar and the focus was on patients with heterogeneous emphysema. Furthermore, the same CT scoring method was employed. This system is based on visually estimating severity of emphysema in three zones (upper, mid...