Medical Thoracoscopy Not the Only Good Way to Biopsy Complex Pleural Effusion
For the diagnosis of people with pleural effusion, an initial image-assisted Abrams needle biopsy (IA-ANPB) can match medical thoracoscopy (MT) in diagnostic accuracy in some cases, a small randomized controlled trial found. IA-ANPB diagnosis had a sensitivity of just 69.7% with a negative likelihood ratio of 0.30 in patients with pleural effusion only, underperforming when […]
More Data in Support of Surgery for Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma
Patients with malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) lived 6 months longer, on average, when they had surgery in addition to chemotherapy, a large retrospective analysis showed. The addition of surgery to combination chemotherapy resulted in a median overall survival (OS) of 22 months as compared with 16 months with chemotherapy alone. Twice as many patients remained […]