Abstract
We examined 339 episodes of atelectasis with acute asthma attack for recent 12 years retrospectively. Aletectasis with acute asthma occurred more frequently in girls (4.1%) than in boys (2.6%), and in age group between 4 and 6 years-old (7.2%) than in age group between 0 and 3 years-old (3.2%) and over 7years-old (2.1%), . The right middle lobe was involved in 68.8% of all episodes, left upper lobe in 13.7% (lingula in 11.5%), right upper lobe in 11.2%, respectively. Recurrent episodes were more frequenly recorded in asthmatic children (42.4%) than in whom with only acute peumonia (12.5%). Atelectasis persist for longer than 1 year in 4 episodes.
Inflammation signs tended to be lower in severe attack than in cases without asthma. It indicated that atelectasis in non-asthmatic cases were asscociated with respiratory tract infection. Duration of atelectasis with the severe attack was significantly shorter and the recurrence rate of it got higher than cases with mild attack and without asthma attack.
Furthermore, we consider that atelectasis is important when we diagnose it as “bronchial asthma”.
