A Case of Prenatally Detected Congenital Lobar Emphysema

ABSTRACT

Congenital lobar emphysema (CLE) is an overinflation of infantile pulmonary lobe caused by air trapping within the affected area. This is usually diagnosed on radiological findings postnatally. Most cases present in the neonatal period with signs of acute or chronic respiratory distress. There are only a few reports of CLE in the literature with prenatal sonographic feature documented. The routine use of prenatal sonography has helped to find fetal anomalies, such as fetal lung mass, that pose a challenge to early diagnosis, appropriate counselling, postnatal follow-up, and better outcome. A boy with CLE was detected by prenatal sonogram. He had a uniformly echogenic right lung with mediastinal shift to the left which was suspected type III congenital cystic adenomatoid malformation prenatally. He showed no evidence of respiratory distress at birth, but experienced progressive tachypnea and chest retraction. He had right middle lobectomy on the seventh postnatal day and pathologic diagnosis of CLE had been made. We report this rare case with brief review of literature. This is the first domestic case which was detected prenatally and confirmed pathologically after lobectomy.