Excessive mirth seems to have gotten the better of a teenager with reports that a 16-year old was hospitalized after laughing to excess.
The Chinese-language Apple Daily reported yesterday that doctors diagnosed the boy with a severe alveolus hemorrhage due to strenuous laughter after he was admitted to Kaohsiung Medical University Chung-Ho Memorial Hospital’s emergency ward.
The report said that the incident was the first case of pneumohemothorax caused by hysterical laughter in the nation. The condition was described in a thesis published by Chen Tai-heng (陳泰亨) the physician at the hospital who treated the teenager.
According to Chen, his patient was chatting with his friend and eating fried chicken at a fast-food restaurant and was laughing hysterically before he fell into convulsions, suddenly dropping to the floor.
The boy was brought to the hospital looking very pale and suffering from shock, Chen said, adding that his patient said he had a stomachache. After assessing his abdominal cavity and making sure his appendix was normal, the physician discovered a massive shade covering his right lung, indicating that the teenager had suffered a spontaneous pneumohemothorax.
He then performed surgery, during which he found that the teenager’s pulmonary alveolar artery had ruptured, squirting out 1.1 liters of blood. After clearing the blood from his chest cavity and giving the boy a transfusion of 2 liters of blood, the patient finally recovered from a critical state, Chen said.
He said that the teenager, who is 170cm tall and weighs 50kg, had lost 30 percent, or 2.4kg, of blood from his circulatory system and could have died. In addition, if a collection of blood inside the intrapleural cavity is not removed, the lungs collapse, in which case the patient dies from asphyxiation, he said.
Chen said the cause of spontaneous pneumothorax is gas entering the intrapleural cavity, which is a vacuum, and that the cause often difficult to pinpoint.
Common symptoms of pneumothorax include pain and stuffiness in the chest, often accompanied with difficulty breathing, he said.
The diagnosis indicated that the teenager ruptured his pulmonary alveoli by laughing strenuously, and also burst his alveolar artery. The gas and blood then entered into intrapleural cavity and caused a pneumohemothorax so severe that it pressurized the nerves in his upper-right abdomen, giving rise to a stomachache.
Chen said that the teenager was hospitalized for six days and told not to laugh so hard again. He said that there is a chance that the syndrome would recur, and that he should avoid expressing extreme emotions.
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