At the Paediatric Medicine Centre in the Lviv region, thoracic surgeons removed a foreign object from the airways of an 18‑month‑old girl. For more than six months, the child had been suffering from a chronic dry cough, shortness of breath and noisy breathing, and for a long time doctors were unable to establish an accurate diagnosis.
The first worrying symptoms appeared when the girl was one year and one month old. The family repeatedly sought help from paediatricians, pulmonologists and allergists; the child was prescribed courses of antibiotics and steroid inhalation therapy. However, the relief was short-lived: once treatment ended, the breathing problems returned.
In search of the cause of the illness, the parents turned to the Paediatric Medicine Centre. The girl first underwent an X‑ray examination. According to the specialists, the images showed characteristic signs of a foreign body in the airways: collapse of one lung (atelectasis), compensatory over-expansion of the other and displacement of the mediastinal organs.
Following a case conference, the paediatric thoracic surgeons decided to perform a diagnostic bronchoscopy. During the procedure, they detected and successfully removed a foreign body from the right main bronchus — a fragment of plastic, probably from a toy. Immediately after the intervention, the child's condition improved: the wheeze disappeared and her breathing normalised, which was confirmed by follow-up radiography — the mediastinum had returned to its usual position and the affected lung had resumed full ventilation. The young patient has already been discharged home.
The head of the Clinic of Thoracic Surgery and Reconstructive Urology in Children, Oleh Leniv, stresses the dangers of such cases.
“Foreign bodies in the airways are an extremely dangerous condition. They pose a risk of sudden respiratory failure, hypoxia and damage to the brain and heart. And if a foreign body remains in the bronchi for a long time, this leads to chronic inflammation and irreversible changes in lung tissue” — Oleh Leniv
Doctors advise parents and fellow medical professionals to pay particular attention in situations where a child has prolonged whistling or wheezing when breathing, has been diagnosed with bronchial asthma or frequently develops pneumonia, and standard treatment and antibiotics do not produce a lasting effect. In such cases, they recommend consulting paediatric thoracic surgeons to rule out the presence of a foreign body in the bronchi.
The operating and diagnostic team included: thoracic surgeon Oleh Leniv, thoracic surgeon Olena Poglod, radiologist Zenoviia Zhydiak, anaesthetists Oksana Matsevko-Huz, scrub nurses and specialists of the Clinic of Thoracic Surgery and Reconstructive Urology in Children.