Identical symptoms, different diagnosis – foreign body or neoplasm? Case study
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Abstract
A foreign body aspiration is most frequently manifested by: dyspnoea, sudden, persistent cough, hemoptysis. However, if the body doesn’t cause a complete obstruction of the airways, its presence in the bronchus may do not involve uncomfortable symptoms and the treatment consisting of removal of the foreign body (FB) during bronchoscopy may occur only after months or years from the moment of aspiration. This situation is most likely if the FB is small or when it is located in the distal parts of bronchi. We present a case of a patient who presented to the hospital with following symptoms: exertional dyspnoea, cough, exercise intolerance and loss of 8 kilos in 6 months time. Owing to the fact that former antibiotherapy implemented on the basis of diagnosed pneumonia turned out ineffective, parallel suspicions of foreign body aspiration and neoplasm have been drawn. It was not until the second bronchoscopy that the foreign body has been shown and removed.
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Copyright: © Medical Education sp. z o.o. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.
Address reprint requests to: Medical Education, Marcin Kuźma (marcin.kuzma@mededu.pl)
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