Surgical management of eight cases of bronchiectasis]

Few reports are currently available on the surgical management of bronchiectasis. We report our experience with 8 cases of bronchiectasis. The indications of pulmonary resection were recurrent pneumonia and/or hemoptysis in spite of medical treatment and the extent mainly limited to the unilateral lung. With the exception of one patient, who died from postoperative pneumonia, all patients showed improvement in symptoms. However, in two cases, hemoptysis recurred; these patients had cystic bronchiectasis, Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections and minimal disease in the contralateral lung, which accounted for the recurrence of hemoptysis. A few reports indicated that cystic bronchiectasis and incomplete resection were adverse prognostic factors and that Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections were related to the development of new bronchiectasis. However, according to some other reports, these factors were not adverse prognostic factors. It is thought that the analysis of many cases is required to determine the indication of lung resection and the appropriate type of resection for bronchiectasis; however, it is difficult to conduct randomized control studies. Since the accumulation of case reports is also considered to be important, we report our series of cases.