Unilateral Wheezing as A Symptom of

Suspected Foreign Body Aspiration in Infant

Rifan Fauzie, Retno Widyaningsih, Dimas D. Saputro
Pediatric Respirology Division
Harapan Kita Women and Children Hospital, Jakarta

Background
- Foreign body ingestion is a common problem in
paediatric populations with up to 75% of cases
occurring in children under 4
- It can cause symptoms like coughing, difficulty in
breathing and hoarse voice in the early period, and
complications like obstructive emphysema,
atelectasis, lung abscess, empyema, bronchiectasis
or pneumothorax in the late period
Objective
To report a case of suspected FBA in an infant with no
certain history of choking and unilateral persistent
wheezing.
Case
• An eleven month old baby boy come to Harapan
Kita Women and Children Hospital suffered from
coughing and left hemithorax wheezing since 3
weeks before.
• There were no history of choking, aspiration or
playing with any part of the toy.
• The baby still doing fine. Bronchodilator nebulized
repeatly showed no improvement.
• CXR reveled left hemithorax
hyperinflation/hyperaeration.
• We then performed flexible bronchoscopy and
found a peanut on left upper bronchus.
• There were also edema on main left bronchus. The
wheezing and coughing subside in a week after we
succeeded remove the peanut.

Fig.2. Peanut in the upper Fig.3. The basket towards to the

left bronchus upper left bronchus, with
granulation tissue surrounded

Fig.1. Left hemithorax hyperinflation

Fig. 5. The basket grabs the Fig. 6. The peanut

Fig. 4. The basket peanut

Conclusion
FB aspiration are still the life-threatening clinical problems in children that require adequate and good timing of
performing diagnostic and yet therapeutic procedure

17th Indonesian Congress of Pediatrics (KONIKA XVII) Jogja, August 8-11, 2017