0000000000541946

AUTHOR

Clio Camus

Pleuroparenchymal fibroelastosis as a late complication of chemotherapy agents

To the Editor: We identified six patients with clinical, radiographic and physiological features typical of pleuroparenchymal fibroelastosis (PPFE). In the six cases, PPFE may have been causally related to prior alkylating drugs used to treat malignacy, namely cyclophosphamide in five of the cases and carmustine (BCNU (1,3-bis-(2-chloroethyl)-1-nitrosourea)) in one. Based on an extensive review of the literature, we suspect that similar cases may have already been reported in the past 4 decades but have not been recognised either as PPFE or as drug-induced in nature. In 2004, Frankel et al. [1] described a then-new clinicopathologic entity, which they termed “idiopathic PPFE”. The authors i…

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Interstitial lung disease induced by drugs and radiation.

An ever-increasing number of drugs can reproduce variegated patterns of naturally occurring interstitial lung disease (ILD), including most forms of interstitial pneumonias, alveolar involvement and, rarely, vasculitis. Drugs in one therapeutic class may collectively produce the same pattern of involvement. A few drugs can produce more than one pattern of ILD. The diagnosis of drug-induced ILD (DI-ILD) essentially rests on the temporal association between exposure to the drug and the development of pulmonary infiltrates. The histopathological features of DI-ILD are generally consistent, rather than suggestive or specific to the drug etiology. Thus, the diagnosis of DI-ILD is mainly made by …

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Drug-induced and iatrogenic infiltrative lung disease.

At present more than 350 drugs are known to cause injury of the lung parenchyma,upper and lower airways, pulmonary circulation, pleura, mediastinum, lymph nodes,and neuromuscular system. Infiltrative lung disease (ILD) is the most common pattern of drug-induced injury. This article, which is clinically oriented rather than drug oriented, reviews the patterns of ILD produced by therapeutic drugs and radiation therapy.

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