Abstract
Introduction:
The tumoral pathology of the chest wall is extremely interesting and wide, and still today it rises a great amount of problems related to the diagnosis and surgical treatement. That is why the purpose of this article is to share our department's experience confronting this type of pathology.
Material and method:
We analysed a series of 154 patients that underwent surgery in our department in ap 10 years period(2001 – 2011), with ages between 21 and 74 years old. 43 of the patients had benign pathology, the rest of 111 had primary, secondary or contiguous malignancies of the chest wall. The surgical procedures applied were chest wall resection followed by reconstruction with several types of synthetic materials such as Thoratex mesh, „Spider Web” suture or the use of methylmetacrylate in 25.4% of the cases and chest wall resection without stabilisation. In 74.6% of the patients. The mean hospital stay was 8 days.
Results:
In all the cases the perioperative mortality and morbidity was zero. The immediate postoperative outcome off the patients was good in 150 cases, 3 cases developed wound seroma that was managed with conservative treatment and one patient underwent a second surgery with muscular flap after stabilisation with methylmetacrylate.
Conclusions:
The tumoral pathology of the chest wall still raises a series of problems of surgical treatment, some cases are indeed a chalange for the surgeon, but the continuous developement of the surgical techniques and of the meterials for reconstruction along with the developement of experienced surgical teams lead to obtaining optimal results without complications that require further surgical attention.
- © 2012 ERS
