An Overview on Thoracoscopy for Pleural Effusion

Abstract

Pleural disease affects more than 300 per 100,000 individuals each year, worldwide. In the United States alone, 1.5 million pleural effusions are diagnosed annually, and represent about a quarter of diagnoses seen by pulmonologists. While history, physical exam and pleural fluid analysis will reveal the diagnosis in a majority of the cases, an estimated 26% of pleural effusions remain undiagnosed and warrant further work up. Many of these undiagnosed effusions are exudative in nature and are especially worrisome, since in low tuberculosis (TB) prevalence areas, more than half of these will be malignant. In TB endemic areas, on the other hand, 84.5% of undiagnosed exudative pleural effusions were eventually found to be secondary to pleural TB (Allocca et al., 2024a).