Doctors find air pocket hidden in man’s brain
(CNN) Doctors treating a patient who had complained of repeatedly losing his balance made an unexpected discovery: The 84-year-old man had a 3½-inch pocket of air in his brain.
The man had been referred to the emergency room by his primary physician in Northern Ireland.
He told his doctor about weeks of recurrent falls and three days of
left-side arm and leg weakness, according to the report, published in
the journal BMJ Case Reports. The patient, who is not identified in the
report, did not have any visual or speech impairments and did not seem
confused or have facial weakness, according to the authors.
“The thing I was most concerned about in an elderly patient with new
onset limb weakness and balance disturbance was some form of stroke,”
said Dr. Finlay Brown, a leading author of the report and a general
practitioner in Belfast who treated the man.
The physicians performed scans of the brain to identify any signs of
bleeding or brain damage caused by blocked blood vessels, according to
Brown.
But what they found was much more unusual.
Small benign tumor
A computed tomography scan of the patient’s brain showed a large
pocket of air — also called a pneumatocele — in the patient’s right
frontal lobe that was approximately 3½ inches long.
“We knew immediately that there was something very abnormal,” Brown
said. “Initially, we thought perhaps the patient hadn’t disclosed having
previously had some form of operation or a congenital abnormality, but …
he confirmed he hadn’t.”
The air pocket was right behind the frontal sinus and above the
cribriform plate, which separates the nasal cavity from the cranial
cavity.
By Mark Lieber, CNN
