Clinical long-term outcome of non-specific pleuritis (NSP) after surgical or medical thoracoscopy

Pleural effusion is a manifestation of a variety of diseases benign or malignant. After thorough clinical work-up that extends from clinical history to diagnostic thoracentesis and imaging techniques, many patients will finally undergo thoracoscopy either for diagnostic purposes, in this case mostly searching for malignancy, and/or for therapeutic ones, in order to proceed to pleural adhesions lysis in inflammatory conditions or to create them by pleurodesis in neoplastic cases (1,2). Thoracoscopy can be performed by the respiratory physician [medical thoracoscopy (MT), or pleuroscopy] under local anesthesia and spontaneous ventilation, or by the surgeon (video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery-VATS) under general anesthesia and selective ventilation, and no randomized trials have compared the two techniques (3)