Catamenial Haemothorax Masquerading Pulmonary Tuberculosis? A Case Report of a 28 Year Old Woman who Presented with Recurrent Haemothorax and Empyema Thoracis

Solomon Kwabena Gumanga, Godfred Takyi, Hakeem Ofosu, Sunday Imogie, Bill Koomson
In: American Journal of Medical Case Reports · 2015 · vol. 3(11) , pp. 362–366 · doi:10.12691/ajmcr-3-11-4 · W2283011225
article OA: green CC0 ⤵ 2 in-corpus citations
📄 Open PDF View on OpenAlex View at publisher
⚙ AI-generated summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-07 ⓘ

This case report details a 28-year-old woman with recurrent hemothorax and empyema, whose condition was treated with GnRH agonist, with pulmonary tuberculosis ruled out despite its endemic prevalence.

One-sentence paraphrase of the abstract; not a substitute for reading it. No clinical advice. How this works

Abstract

Catamenial haemothorax is a clinical manifestation of endometriosis of the pleural cavity. This is a case report of a 28 year old woman who presented with recurrent catamenial haemothorax who had histological confirmation of pelvic endometriosis and uterine leiomyoma. A presumptive diagnosis of catamenial haemothorax was made as it was not possible to get a histological confirmation of endometriosis of the pleural cavity. She was treated effectively with gonadotropin-releasing hormone GnRH agonist-leuprorelin. Antituberculosis treatment was however added when she developed empyema thoracis instead of haemothorax at a time she was experiencing amenorrhoea. Pulmonary tuberculosis being an endemic disease remained the main differential diagnosis but was never confirmed at any stage by investigations conducted. She has since not experienced any recurrence in eighteen months of follow-up after treatment was completed. Conclusion: Pulmonary or thoracic endometriosis though rare; should be considered seriously in women of reproductive age who present with recurrent catamenial haemothorax. Due to obscured locations of the endometriosis lesions in the thoracic cavity; the diagnosis may be difficult to confirm since access to investigative tools is limited in developing countries.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

Condition tags

endometriosisthoracic_endometriosis

Citation neighborhood

Papers in the corpus that this work cites (lower rings, blue) and that cite this one (upper rings, green). Dot size scales with the paper's in-corpus citation count — bigger dot = more influential within the endo/adeno field. Click a dot to open that paper. [ expand to 2 hops ] — adds papers reached through this work's immediate citers/citees. Heavier; up to 60 extra dots.

References (12)

Cited by (2)

Source provenance

openalex
last seen: 2026-06-04T00:00:01.174412+00:00
License: CC0 · commercial use OK