Plastic bronchitis associated with corrected cardiac anomaly in a child

Abstract

Plastic bronchitis (PB) is a rare disease that causes airway obstruction with large «rubber» bronchial casts in adults and children, mainly due to concomitant cardiac or pulmonary pathology. It involves the organization of exudate or transudate, which takes the form of the respiratory tract. Mortality with PB reaches 50%. Exact epidemiological data are not known. In most patients, PB occurs in the context of major diseases, which can be conditionally divided into two groups: heart and vascular disease and secondary complication of pulmonary diseases. Usually PB manifests with episodes of dyspnea, tachycardia, hypoxia, fever and cough associated with airway obstruction. Sometimes the symptoms resemble asthma or obstructive bronchitis, accompanied by wheezing and the symptoms of respiratory failure, decreasing of saturation (of what?), the development of pneumothorax. All existing methods of treatment are symptomatic. Promising methods of therapy are the use of inhaled unfractionated heparin and a recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (TAP). The article presents a clinical case of PB in a girl of 5 years with the background of corrected cardiac anomaly.