A Case of Traumatic Hemopneumothorax Successfully Treated by Transcatheter Arterial Embolization in an 83-year-old Patient

Abstract

An 83-year-old man who had fallen in his house and got a bruise on the right-sided chest was brought into the emergency room and was diagnosed with right multiple rib fractures, traumatic hemothorax and pneumothorax. Five hundred milliliters of bloody effusion were drained through a chest drain. A chest contrast-enhanced CT scan showed the bleeding from the intercostal artery. As his hemodynamics was stable, emergency angiography and transcatheter arterial embolization (TAE) were performed. The extravascular leakage disappeared after the procedure and the chest drain was removed on post-operative day (POD) 7. He was discharged home on POD27. The less invasive TAE can be a good option for treatment of chest trauma in the older people whose operations entail a high risk of causing postoperative complications.