Man Coughs Up a Giant Blood Clot in the Shape of His Lung
A man coughed up a large blood clot that was in the shape of his "bronchial tree," or the lung's branched airway passages. ...
The 36-year old man was being treated for a serious heart condition, according to a new report of the case, published Nov. 29 in The New England Journal of Medicine. He had chronic heart failure, which means the heart muscle can't pump enough blood to meet the body's normal demands.
His condition was so severe that doctors put him on a machine called a ventricular assist device, which helps the heart pump blood. But because these machines can also increase the risk of blood clots, he was prescribed a blood-thinner medication.
However, these medications also increase the risk of bleeding, including coughing up blood. Indeed, the patient had several coughing episodes in which he expelled small amounts of blood ... But then, during an "extreme bout of coughing," the patient spit out an "intact cast" of the right bronchial tree. In other words, it was a mold (cast) made of clotted blood in the shape of the lung's branched airway passages known as bronchi.
"We were astonished," Dr. Georg Wieselthaler, a heart and lung surgeon at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) ... "It's a curiosity you can't imagine — I mean, this is very, very, very rare."
It's less rare for patients to cough up bronchial "casts" made of other substances, such as lymph or mucus. But blood is less sticky and sturdy than these other substances, meaning that a cast made of blood is less likely to hold together when coughed up ...
Even though the man had no further episodes of coughing up blood, he unfortunately died a week later from complications of heart failure. ...
