[Middle lobectomy for bronchiectasis: clinical case and review of the literature]. / Lobectomia media per bronchiectasie. Caso clinico e revisione della letteratura.

Over the past few years bronchiectasis, among the chronic lung diseases, has been the second most important after tuberculosis in terms of frequency and mortality. Although the incidence of the disease has been decreasing in recent years, the illness is currently of great surgical interest because of an upsurge of cases among people considered to be below the bread line. The authors present the clinical case and surgical treatment of a young adult with middle lobe bronchiectasis, with a 10-year primary IgG deficiency and severe bronchopneumonia requiring hospitalisation. Medical treatment, long regarded as the treatment of choice in this condition, has reduced the short-term morbidity of patients suffering from the disease, without affecting its ultimate mortality which is still very high today. The policy in the past to reserve surgery only for the most complicated cases or for patients not responding to medical treatment can now be considered obsolete, due to the reduced surgical risks (less than 1%) and to faster patient recovery. Further surgical indications are mono- or bilaterally located forms of the disease and failure to respond to medical treatment for more than 2 years. A review of the literature enables the authors to affirm that in the absence of randomised trials on the effectiveness of surgical vs medical treatment, it seems clear that surgical therapy is the best option, being curative and safe, with a high percentage of complete remission of disease and very low operative risks and mortality. It can therefore guarantee good quality of life, radically changing the prognosis which otherwise is fatal in 1/3 of patients suffering from this orphan disease.

Recurrent gastric carcinoma causing pseudoachalasia: case report.

We report the case of a patient with a gastric remnant relapse of an antral carcinoma resected 5 years before and presenting with the clinical feature of a secondary achalasia (pseudoachalasia). In spite of the patient's 4-month history of dysphagia and weight loss that suggested a malignant lesion, barium swallow, repeated endoscopic biopsies and computed tomography (CT) scan of the upper abdomen did not reveal any abnormalities to indicate a recurrence. However, in the following months, because of worsening symptoms, a further CT scan was performed and revealed thickening of the cardia and gastric wall. The patient underwent an exploratory laparotomy that showed an unresectable lesion involving the gastric fundus, the diaphragm and penetrating into the mediastinum, and therefore a palliative jejunostomy was performed.

[The distribution of Rh blood groups in the population of Puglia]. / Distribuzione dei gruppi sanguigni Rh nella popolazione Pugliese.

The authors have conducted a study on the genic frequency within the Rh system in 3.000 subjects of certain Apulia ancestry. The results, in agreement with those of previous authors, have demonstrated that the frequency of the haplotypes containing "d" appears clearly lower than the national average value.