Chest
Clinical InvestigationsClinical Efficacy and Safety of Thoracoscopic Talc Pleurodesis in Malignant Pleural Effusions
Section snippets
Patients
One hundred two consecutive patients with documented rapidly recurrent MPE (57 men and 45 women; median age, 66 years; age range, 20 to 83 years) who underwent medical thoracoscopy and TTP between January 1999 and December 2001 were included. Only those patients who were judged to be capable of undergoing this procedure were enrolled in the study. The patients with a poor performance status who were unable to care for themselves were excluded from the procedure. Chest radiography and thoracic
Results
One hundred two patients were treated within the 3-year survey period. The presenting symptom in the majority of patients (86.3%) was dyspnea. Also common was cough (22.5%) and thoracic pain (23.5%) as secondary symptoms. The characteristics of the study population are noted in Table 1. The main tumor types were lung cancer (n = 48), breast cancer (n = 16), and malignant pleural mesothelioma (n = 10), and the remainder was a heterogeneous group of malignancies. Median duration of suction
Discussion
In symptomatic patients with recurrent MPE of known or unknown etiology, medical thorascopy and TTP is recommended.1, 13, 14, 15 Talc is superior to other agents in producing pleurodesis,16 but the clinical success rate of TTP varies, and the safety of this procedure is currently being intensively discussed. Therefore, we conducted this analysis in order to address both issues.
Unfortunately, the definition of success, as well as the length of follow-up, differs in the literature, which
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