[Should caval interruptions be performed? Technical progress is faster than validation of indications].
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Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to G Simonneau.
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Primary pulmonary hypertension (PPH) is an uncommon disease, of unknown cause. Patients are usually young with a slight predominance in females. We report our experience of 125 patients over 10 years and it is compared to the data of the literature. Epidemiology, physiopathology, clinical and hemodynamic features are reported. Therapeutic aspects are discussed, pointing out on more recent approaches like vasodilating drugs, lung and heart-lung transplantation. Prognosis and survival are presented.
Between June 1986 and October 1989, 29 heart lung transplantations and 4 double lung transplantations were performed at the Marie Lannelongue Hospital, Paris. The early and later course of these patients was studied. The actuarial survival rates at one and two years were 65 percent and 55 percent respectively. Bacterial infection was the main cause of early death. Late morbidity was predominantly due to cytomegalovirus infection and episodes of rejection. Respiratory function, evaluated in 19 long-term survivors, was usually normal. Only 3 patients developed a functional pattern of severe obliterative bronchiolitis probably related to uncontrolled rejections. The indications of the different types of lung transplantation are discussed: in cases of primary pulmonary hypertension or Eisenmenger's complex, heart lung transplantation is the only possible procedure. In patients with respiratory failure without cardiac dysfunction, double lung transplantation gives good functional results and makes an extra heart available for transplantation in another patient. Single lung transplantation, which gives worse functional results with a similar mortality rate, must be reserved for patients who are unable to undergo double lung transplantation.
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Two cases of nodular regenerative hyperplasia of the liver coexisting with pulmonary hypertension are described. Regarding its low frequency, nodular regenerative hyperplasia has been found more often than expected in our series of coexisting porto-pulmonary hypertension (2 out of 14 cases, 14 percent). In our 2 cases, pulmonary symptoms occurred before or simultaneously with hepatic symptoms. The high prevalence of this association and the unusual onset setting of symptoms suggest that this association is unfortuitous. A common pathogenesis for pulmonary and hepatic lesions is discussed.
Lung transplantation has been made possible by the advent of cyclosporin, and it can be divided into three categories: single lung, double lung and heart-lung transplantations. Heart-lung transplantation is the only one that can be performed in case of primary pulmonary arterial hypertension, but the respective indications of these three types of transplantation in patients with respiratory failure have not yet been clearly determined. Heart-lung transplantation is also the one that gives the best results in terms of survival and respiratory function. In the post-operative period, graft rejection and bacterial, viral, fungal or parasitic infections are responsible for a 35 per cent death rate. Later in life, transplant recipients are prone to respiratory impairment caused by obliterating bronchiolitis, itself due to insufficiently treated chronic rejection. The development of lung transplantation is considerably limited by the scarcity of donors with procurable lungs and by the frequency of heart procurement at the expense of the heart-lung block.
Many sampling methods have been proposed to make a bacteriological diagnosis of community-acquired pneumonia. The diagnostic accuracy of these methods depend upon technical constraints which are hardly obtainable in real world situations. In hospitals, close cooperation between clinicians and bacteriologists can help improve the reliability of these techniques, but in current practice the benefits of bacteriological identification often compete with the empirical therapeutic approach. This approach must remain within defined limits, since its uncontrolled widening can lead to major drawbacks. Whenever possible, bacteriological identification of the offending organism must be of concern.
STUDY OBJECTIVE: To determine, during heparin therapy, the embolic risk associated with acute inferior vena cava thrombosis compared with noncaval thrombosis. DESIGN: Prospective controlled study. SETTING: University-affiliated general hospital. PATIENTS: Of 68 consecutive patients considered, 18 with cavographically proved inferior vena cava thrombosis and 45 with phlebography-proved noncaval proximal thrombosis met all other eligibility criteria and completed the study. INTERVENTIONS: All patients received adjusted continuous IV heparin therapy for ten days. MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS: All 63 patients underwent systematic baseline and "day 10" perfusion lung scanning and phlebocavography. None suffered pulmonary embolism within the ten days, but 11/63 patients showed thrombus extension on day 10 phlebocavograms. Retrospectively, no significant difference could be found between the groups with and without extension. CONCLUSIONS: (a) The early embolic risk associated with heparin-treated venous thromboses appears low and does not seem to depend on the location (caval or more peripheral) of venous clots. (b) Thrombus extension may occur in spite of apparently "adequate" anticoagulation with heparin.
Almitrine improves blood gas values in patients with COPD, primarily through better ventilation-perfusion matching. The improvement comes largely from a vasomotor effect of the drug. The vasomotor mechanism is unknown. We suspected that decreased distensibility of the large pulmonary arteries was one probable effect of the drug. If present, reduced distensibility would explain many of the hemodynamic alterations produced by almitrine. To test this idea, we measured the diameter of the right pulmonary artery during systole and diastole both before and after almitrine administration in nine patients who were undergoing pulmonary cineangiography. Our calculations of the distensibility of the right pulmonary artery showed that almitrine caused a 60 percent decrease. This significant alteration in the stiffness of the large pulmonary arteries can account for the rise in systolic pressure, a change that would be expected to redistribute pulmonary blood flow upwards and thereby improve ventilation-perfusion balance.
The purpose of this study is the retrospective evaluation of the treatment of 196 cases of pulmonary embolism. Therapeutic attitude was standardized. Intravenous heparin followed early on by oral anticoagulants remains the basic treatment of the majority of patients (74%). This treatment could be associated with: (1) Fibrinolysis with urokinase bolus at the time of massive pulmonary embolism with clinical and hemodynamic signs of shock (14%). No severe hemorrhagic complication was observed. 2) Inferior vena caval interruption in case of contraindications or failure of anticoagulation (29%). Only one death was observed in this study.
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A patient with drug induced alveolitis due to an antidepressant drug, nomifensine, is described. After an inadvertent rechallenge by the patient sequential bronchoalveolar lavage was carried out. Twenty four hours after the rechallenge the lavage fluid contained a high cell count with neutrophils predominating. Seven days after challenge the cells were predominantly lymphocytes.
Digital subtraction angiography (DSA) performed via a peripheral vein was compared prospectively with selective conventional pulmonary angiography (CPA) in 54 patients suspected of having pulmonary embolism (PE). All patients also underwent ascending venography. In contrast to the conventional pulmonary angiograms, all of which were considered satisfactory, 13 of 54 digital subtraction angiograms (24%) were technically unsatisfactory. The interpretable digital subtraction angiograms had 81% sensitivity and 64% specificity. With DSA, one cannot exclude the diagnosis of PE on the basis of normal angiograms (27% false-positive results) as one can with perfusion scanning. On the other hand, DSA showed good sensitivity (94%) in medium to major PE. Therefore it may be the technique of choice in the screening of life-threatening PE for which curative emergency treatment with thrombolytic agents or embolectomy is often necessary.
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