Unusual foreign bodies of the airway: a case series regarding their management

<p>Foreign bodies in the bronchi are a common problem seen by ENT surgeons. Bronchial foreign bodies are common in children because they have difficulty in swallowing hard foodstuffs such as nuts and have an inadequately developed protective respiratory reflexes, which makes them vulnerable to inhalation of foreign bodies This is a case series of four unusual cases of foreign body airway, that presented to our ENT OPD, after taking detailed history and clinical examination, these patients were subjected to radiological studies such as chest X-rays, X-ray soft tissue lateral view, virtual bronchoscopy and CT chest to confirm the foreign body, after taking informed consent rigid bronchoscopy was performed and foreign body extracted.</p>

Evolution of the hypoxia-sensitive cells involved in amniote respiratory reflexes

The evolutionary origins of the hypoxia-sensitive cells that trigger amniote respiratory reflexes – carotid body glomus cells, and ‘pulmonary neuroendocrine cells’ (PNECs) - are obscure. Homology has been proposed between glomus cells, which are neural crest-derived, and the hypoxia-sensitive ‘neuroepithelial cells’ (NECs) of fish gills, whose embryonic origin is unknown. NECs have also been likened to PNECs, which differentiate in situ within lung airway epithelia. Using genetic lineage-tracing and neural crest-deficient mutants in zebrafish, and physical fate-mapping in frog and lamprey, we find that NECs are not neural crest-derived, but endoderm-derived, like PNECs, whose endodermal origin we confirm. We discover neural crest-derived catecholaminergic cells associated with zebrafish pharyngeal arch blood vessels, and propose a new model for amniote hypoxia-sensitive cell evolution: endoderm-derived NECs were retained as PNECs, while the carotid body evolved via the aggregation of neural crest-derived catecholaminergic (chromaffin) cells already associated with blood vessels in anamniote pharyngeal arches.