CASE REPORT / SHORT REPORT   Open access

Italian Journal of Emergency Medicine 2020 August;9(2):80-6

DOI: 10.23736/S2532-1285.20.00029-4

Copyright © 2020 THE AUTHORS

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license which allows users to copy and distribute the manuscript, as long as this is not done for commercial purposes and further does not permit distribution of the manuscript if it is changed or edited in any way, and as long as the user gives appropriate credits to the original author(s) and the source (with a link to the formal publication through the relevant DOI) and provides a link to the license.

language: English

Pneumomediastinum complicating the use of non-invasive ventilation in COVID-19 pneumonia: a short case-series

Sokol BERISHA ¹, Mariastella DIONISI ¹, Mariarita TALIANI ¹, Nabila SAID ¹, Alessandra VINCI ², Francesco BALDUCCI ², Cecilia BECATTINI ², Paolo GROFF ¹ ✉

¹ Emergency Department Observation Unit, Hospital of Perugia, Perugia, Italy; ² Internal, Vascular Medicine and Stroke Unit, University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy

While knowledge is growing in the world on SARS-Cov2 related disease, few reports are still available about all its possible pleomorphic presentations and complications. Pneumomediastinum, for example, is a condition only sporadically reported so far in COVID-19 pneumonia. In this paper we report of three cases of pneumomediastinum complicating the use of mechanical ventilation for acute hypoxemic respiratory failure due to COVID-19 pneumonia and discuss its possible correlation with the peculiarity of the disease at the pathological level.

KEY WORDS: Coronavirus; Pneumonia; Pneumomediastinum, diagnostic; Noninvasive ventilation