A Rare Case of Spontaneous Pneumopericardium

Abdallah Almaghraby^1*, Ahmed Samoka¹, Mahmoud Shehata², Hoda Zahran², Yehia Saleh¹, and Basma Hammad³

DOI: 10.26717/BJSTR.2017.01.000101

Received: April 11, 2017   Published: May 16, 2017

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Abstract

A 54-year-old man presented with a 6-hour history of acute typical retrosternal chest pain that occurred during minor exertion and was persistent from the start and not relieved by analgesics. His medical history was unremarkable, he was a heavy smoker. His clinical examination was unremarkable. His electrocardiogram (ECG) showed ST segment elevation in the inferior leads with PR depression in the anterior leads. His chest X-ray (CXR) lead (Figure 1) to a suspicion of intra-pericardial collection of air. His laboratory results were all normal except for mild elevation in cardiac enzymes. Echocardiography showed normal study, the suspicion of the intra-pericardial air collection had led us to do a chest computed tomography (CT) (Figure 2) which revealed the presence of air inside the pericardium. The patient was still in intractable pain with serial elevating cardiac enzymes so we decided to do coronary angiography that revealed normal coronaries (Figure 3).

Introduction | Case Report | Discussion | Conclusion | Figures | References