Type of Surgery
Information
Last updated: 02/17/2009
The risks for any surgical procedure requiring anesthesia include reactions to the medications and breathing problems. The risks for any surgical procedure include bleeding and infection.
Between 40% and 60% of pneumonectomy patients experience...
such short-term postoperative difficulties as:
- prolonged need for a mechanical respirator
- abnormal heart rhythm (cardiac arrhythmia); heart attack (myocardial infarction); or other heart problem
- pneumonia
- infection at the site of the incision
- a blood clot in the remaining lung (pulmonary embolism)
- an abnormal connection between the stump of the cut bronchus and the pleural space due to a leak in the stump (bronchopleural fistula)
- accumulation of pus in the pleural space (empyema)
- kidney or other organ failure
Over time, the remaining organs in the patient's chest may move into the space left by the surgery. This condition is called postpneumonectomy syndrome; the surgeon can correct it by inserting a fluid-filled prosthesis into the space formerly occupied by the diseased lung.
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Other Information
A pneumonectomy (or pneumectomy) is a surgical procedure to remove a lung. Removal of just one lobe of the lung is specifically referred to as a lobectomy, and that of a segment of the lung as a wedge resection (or segmentectomy).
The most common cause for a pneumonectomy is to excise tumourous tissue arising from lung cancer. Other indications for lobectomy include a solitary pulmonary nodule (the possibility of undiagnosed small-cell cancer in this instance is not necessarily a reason for avoiding thoracotomy), or bronchiectasis where other forms of treatment have failed, particularly if it is localised and recurrent hemoptysis is present. In the days prior to the use of antibiotics in tuberculosis treatment, tuberculosis was sometimes treated surgically by pneumonectomy.
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