What are the early symptoms of pneumothorax and what are the signs of pneumothorax?

Factors that may trigger pneumothorax include strenuous exercise, coughing, lifting heavy objects or raising the upper arms, weightlifting, straining during bowel movements, and blunt force trauma. So what are the symptoms of pneumothorax? What are the symptoms of early pneumothorax?

1. Pneumothorax

The severity of symptoms depends on how quickly they develop, the degree of lung compression, and the underlying lung disease. Typical symptoms are sudden chest pain, followed by chest tightness and difficulty breathing, and may be accompanied by an irritating cough. This chest pain is often stabbing or cutting and lasts for a short time. Irritating dry cough is caused by gas irritating the pleura. Most patients have an acute onset, large pneumothorax, or those with pre-existing lung lesions, in which case shortness of breath is obvious. Some patients experience triggers such as severe coughing, holding their breath while defecating or lifting heavy objects before pneumothorax occurs, but many patients develop the disease during normal activities or quiet rest. Moderate pneumothorax in young healthy people rarely causes discomfort, and sometimes the patient is only discovered during physical examination or routine chest fluoroscopy; however, elderly people with emphysema may experience obvious dyspnea even if the lung is compressed by less than 10%.

2. Tension pneumothorax

Patients often show signs of extreme mental tension, fear, irritability, shortness of breath, a feeling of suffocation, cyanosis, sweating, and a weak and rapid pulse, low blood pressure, cold and wet skin, and other shock states, and may even become unconscious and coma. If not promptly treated, it often leads to death. Patients with pneumothorax generally do not have fever, elevated white blood cell count or increased erythrocyte sedimentation rate. If these manifestations occur, it often indicates that the original lung infection (tuberculous or purulent) is active or complications (such as exudative pleurisy or empyema) have occurred.

3. Bilateral pneumothorax may occur in a small number of patients

The most prominent symptom is dyspnea, followed by chest pain and cough. It was also found that the incidence of bilateral metachronous spontaneous pneumothorax (i.e. pneumothorax that occurs first on one side and then on both sides) was relatively higher than that of bilateral simultaneous spontaneous pneumothorax, reaching 83.9%.

4. Some patients with pneumothorax

If accompanied by mediastinal emphysema, the dyspnea will be more severe and there will often be obvious cyanosis. Even more rarely, pneumothorax occurs when pleural adhesions or pleural blood vessels are torn, resulting in hemothorax. If the amount of bleeding is large, it may manifest as signs of shock such as pale complexion, cold sweat, weak pulse, and decreased blood pressure. But most patients only have minor bleeding.

5. Asthma patients

In the case of persistent asthma, if the condition continues to worsen despite active treatment, it should be considered whether pneumothorax has occurred. On the contrary, patients with pneumothorax sometimes present with asthma-like symptoms, severe shortness of breath, and even wheezing in both lungs. Once the pleural cavity is decompressed, the shortness of breath and wheezing will disappear.