Reexpansion Pulmonary Edema following Laparoscopy-Assisted Distal Gastrectomy for a Patient with

Copyright © 2012 Kazuhito Yajima et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We report here a case of reexpansion pulmonary edema following laparoscopy-assisted distal gastrectomy (LADG) for early gastric cancer. A 57-year-old Japanese woman with no preoperative comorbidity was diagnosed with early gastric cancer. The patient underwent LADG using the pneumoperitoneum method. During surgery, the patient was unintentionally subjected to single-lung ventilation for approximately 247 minutes due to intratracheal tube dislocation. One hour after surgery, she developed severe dyspnea and produced a large amount of pink frothy sputum. Chest radiography results showed diffuse ground-glass attenuation and alveolar consolidation in both lungs without cardiomegaly. A diagnosis of pulmonary edema was made, and the patient was immediately intubated and received ventilatory support with high positive end-expiratory pressure. The patient gradually recovered and was weaned from the ventilatory support on the third postoperative day. This case shows that single-lung ventilation may be a risk factor for reexpansion pulmonary edema during laparoscopic surgery with pneumoperitoneum. 1