Artificial pneumothorax

An 84-year-old man presented with dyspnoea and chest pain, together with a chest X-ray demonstrating a complete white-out of the left hemithorax. Four decades earlier he had been treated for tuberculosis with an artificial pneumothorax. A diagnosis of pyothorax-associated lymphoma (exclusively B-cell non-Hodgkin’s type) was made. Strongly associated with Epstein-Barr virus infection, pyothorax-associated lymphoma is known to develop in the chronic inflammatory environment of a pleural cavity in patients with a long-standing history of pyothorax.