Left-Sided Catamenial Pneumothorax with Thoracic Endometriosis and Bullae in the Alveolar Wall

Ryo Takahashi, Masatoshi Kurihara, Teruaki Mizobuchi, Hiroki Ebana, Sumitaka Yamanaka
Annals of thoracic and cardiovascular surgery : official journal of the Association of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgeons of Asia · 2016 · vol. 23(2) , pp. 108–112 · doi:10.5761/atcs.cr.16-00112 · PMID:27507105 · PMC5422637 · W2517716832
article OA: gold CC0 ⤵ 7 in-corpus citations
📄 Open PDF Full text JSON View on OpenAlex View on PubMed View at publisher
⚙ AI-generated summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-11 ⓘ

This case details a rare instance of left-sided catamenial pneumothorax originating from visceral pleural endometriosis, identified via immunohistochemistry after lung resection.

One-sentence paraphrase of the abstract; not a substitute for reading it. No clinical advice. How this works

⚙ AI-generated deep summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-11 · read from full text ⓘ

The paper reports a case of left-sided catamenial pneumothorax in a 33-year-old woman with a history of pelvic endometriosis, occurring at the end of a course of low-dose contraceptive pills. Chest CT identified a left upper lobe bulla, and the patient underwent partial lung resection; immunohistochemistry confirmed endometrial stromal tissue in the visceral pleura, with no observed diaphragm abnormalities, supporting this pleural lesion as the cause. The main limitation is that the report represents a single case and cannot establish broader prevalence or mechanisms beyond this patient. This paper is centrally about endometriosis — specifically thoracic (visceral pleural) endometriosis causing left-sided catamenial pneumothorax.

Read from the paper's body, not the abstract. Not a substitute for reading the paper. No clinical advice. How this works

Abstract

Catamenial pneumothorax (CP) is generally caused by intraperitoneal air leaking from the uterus into the thoracic cavity via a defect in the endometrial tissue of the diaphragm and is usually detected in the right thorax. We report a case of left-sided CP caused by endometriosis in the visceral pleura and with no abnormal findings in the diaphragm. A 33-year-old female patient presented at the end of a course of low-dose contraceptive pills for pelvic endometriosis, with spontaneous pneumothorax in the left chest. Chest CT revealed a bulla in the left upper lung lobe. The patient underwent partial resection of the lung. Immunohistochemistry confirmed the presence of endometrial stromal tissue in the visceral pleura and confirmed this as the cause of pneumothorax since there were no observable abnormalities in the diaphragm. This case suggests that immunohistochemical examination of patients with spontaneous pneumothorax can detect alternative endometrial lesions.
Full text 1,433 characters · extracted from oa-doi-fallback · click to expand
Case Reports Left-Sided Catamenial Pneumothorax with Thoracic Endometriosis and Bullae in the Alveolar Wall 2017 Volume 23 Issue 2 Pages 108-112 Details Abstract Catamenial pneumothorax (CP) is generally caused by intraperitoneal air leaking from the uterus into the thoracic cavity via a defect in the endometrial tissue of the diaphragm and is usually detected in the right thorax. We report a case of left-sided CP caused by endometriosis in the visceral pleura and with no abnormal findings in the diaphragm. A 33-year-old female patient presented at the end of a course of low-dose contraceptive pills for pelvic endometriosis, with spontaneous pneumothorax in the left chest. Chest CT revealed a bulla in the left upper lung lobe. The patient underwent partial resection of the lung. Immunohistochemistry confirmed the presence of endometrial stromal tissue in the visceral pleura and confirmed this as the cause of pneumothorax since there were no observable abnormalities in the diaphragm. This case suggests that immunohistochemical examination of patients with spontaneous pneumothorax can detect alternative endometrial lesions. © 2017 The Editorial Committee of Annals of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery This article is licensed under a Creative Commons [Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International] license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Favorites & Alerts Recently viewed articles

Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

⚙ Ask this paper AI returns verbatim quotes from the full text · source: oa-doi-fallback ⓘ

Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works

Condition tags

endometriosisthoracic_endometriosis

MeSH descriptors

Blister Endometriosis Pneumothorax Pneumothorax Pulmonary Alveoli Pulmonary Alveoli Pulmonary Alveoli Thoracic Diseases Adult Biopsy Blister Blister Blister Endometriosis Endometriosis Endometriosis Female Humans Immunohistochemistry Pneumonectomy

Citation neighborhood

Papers in the corpus that this work cites (lower rings, blue) and that cite this one (upper rings, green). Dot size scales with the paper's in-corpus citation count — bigger dot = more influential within the endo/adeno field. Click a dot to open that paper. [ expand to 2 hops ] — adds papers reached through this work's immediate citers/citees. Heavier; up to 60 extra dots.

References (13)

Cited by (7)

SciLite annotations

organisms 2
noordeloos 2009062 rabbits
chemicals 2
xenocyloin f alcohol

Source provenance

europepmc
last seen: 2026-06-12T06:13:51.797165+00:00
openalex
last seen: 2026-06-10T17:14:06.276822+00:00
pubmed
last seen: 2026-05-13T22:20:54.390225+00:00
scilite
last seen: 2026-05-18T04:26:01.642840+00:00
License: CC0 · commercial use OK