Hello and welcome to the Zero to Finals podcast.

My name is Tom, and in this episode I'm going to be talking to you about Plural Effusions.

If you want to follow along with written notes on this topic,

you can follow along at zero tofinals.com slash plural effusions

or in the respiratory section of the zero to finals medicine book.

So let's get straight into it.

A plural effusion is a collection of fluid in the plural cavity.

And this is a cavity between the lung and the chest wall.

This can be either exudative, meaning there's a high protein count of above

3 grams per liter of protein, or transudative, meaning there's a relatively lower protein count

of less than 3 grams per liter. Whether it's exudative or transudative helps you to determine

what the cause of the pleural effusion is. Exudative causes are causedative helps you to determine what the cause of the plural effusion is.

Exudative causes are caused by inflammation, and the inflammation results in protein leaking out of the

tissues into the plural space, X meaning moving out of. Think of the causes of inflammation

when you want to think of the causes of exudative

plural effusions. And this is things like lung cancer, pneumonia or lung infections, rheumatoid arthritis

and tuberculosis. Transudative causes relate to fluid moving across into the plural space.

Trans meaning moving across.

And you can think of the causes of fluid shifting, which would be congestive cardiac failure,

hypoalbuminemia or low albumin level in the blood,

hypothyroidism or low thyroid level,

Meag syndrome, which is a triad of a right-sided pleural effusion, ovarian cancer, and ascites.

...