Abstract

GONZALEZ-MARTINEZ, KI.. Diagnosis of pneumonia by ultrasound at emergency room. Med. interna Méx. [online]. 2017, vol.33, n.6, pp.822-825. ISSN 0186-4866.  https://doi.org/10.24245/mim.v33i6.1673.

This paper reports the clinical case of a 54-year-old male patient, which entered to the service due to respiratory difficulty. Patient initiated his current suffering a month before the hospital admission with productive cough with purulent, abundant expectoration, not quantified fever, and loss of weight, two days before to his hospital admission respiratory difficulty was added that was exacerbated approximately 3 hours prior to income. To the physical exploration conscious patient was observed with vital signs: HR 130 bpm, RR 27 bpm, blood pressure 115/73 mmHg, temperature 36.4ºC, with shortness of breath, use of accessory muscles, tachycardia, tachypnea, with saturation to air ambience of 89%; precedents of importance: positive drug dependency; clinic data were integrated of community-acquired pneumonia, X-ray chest evidenced effacement of the costophrenic and costodiaphragmatic angle; thus, it was suspected pleural effusion; however, it was decided to perform pulmonary USG to confirm effusion vs pleural pulmonary consolidation, in which there were data compatible with low pleural effusion and right basal pulmonary consolidation area; handling was started with double antibiotic scheme. This article demonstrates that pulmonary USG turns out to be an effective and reliable tool in the early diagnosis of pneumonia in the Emergency Department, without necessity of chest X-ray, it has even much larger sensitivity for diagnosis of pleural effusion in comparison with conventional radiography.

Keywords : pneumonia; pulmonary ultrasound; pleural effusion; lines B; chest radiograph.

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