The 18-year-old Zhang is a tall, thin boy, 1 meter tall, weighing only 120 pounds, a typical thin bamboo pole body type. This year, during the summer holidays with classmates playing basketball, after playing not two days to feel the left chest tightness, back also a little pulling pain, when they did not take it seriously. Later, the chest tightness became heavier and heavier, and from time to time also dry cough two, deep breath always breathless feeling, family members rushed to take him to the emergency room. The emergency doctor listened to his inspiratory sounds and immediately sent him to take a chest X-ray. The report showed that “left pneumothorax, lung compression 90%”, pneumothorax? The first time I heard this term, Zhang knew nothing about it and was full of questions. The thoracic surgeon immediately put a tube in the emergency room to ventilate his chest cavity after consultation. After the tube was placed, the alarm was lifted and Zhang could finally breathe a sigh of relief. 1.What is pneumothorax? If the rib cage and muscle composition of the thorax is a box, then the lung is a balloon placed in the box, the left and right chest cavity each one. Under normal circumstances the balloon is blown full of the entire box, and once the gas enters the box for various reasons, squeezing the space of the balloon, the balloon is compressed to become smaller, and that is the pneumothorax. 2.What are the symptoms of pneumothorax? Common symptoms are chest tightness, chest pain, shoulder and back pain, irritating dry cough, difficulty in whistling, etc. Serious people cannot lie down and need to sit up and whistle. A small number of people with combined bleeding may even suffer from hemorrhagic shock, which is life-threatening. These symptoms are not specific, and an experienced thoracic surgeon can determine them with a stethoscope, and the diagnosis can be confirmed with a chest X-ray or CT. The severity of pneumothorax symptoms is closely related to the degree of lung compression, lung function and other conditions. The stronger the lung compression, the more obvious the symptoms. In young people with good lung function, the lung compression is very strong before they start to have mild symptoms. I have seen several cases of young people with lung compression greater than 90%, and the doctor is very anxious, but he himself is not panicking. Elderly patients, because of poor lung function, tend to have little lung compression before they feel obvious chest tightness and shortness of breath. 3.Why do I have pneumothorax? There are two main common causes: if someone pierces a box or balloon with a knife, this is a traumatic pneumothorax; if your balloon itself is of questionable quality and spontaneously ruptures and leaks, that is a spontaneous pneumothorax, as the saying goes, “the lung is blown up”, the lung will really break itself. Xiao Zhang obviously belongs to the latter. There are two main groups of people who are prone to spontaneous pneumothorax, one is the young people with lean and tall body type who are prone to primary spontaneous pneumothorax because of poor congenital development of lung, and the other is the elderly who are prone to secondary spontaneous pneumothorax because of long-term smoking, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), tuberculosis, lung cancer and other underlying lung diseases. Most of the pneumothorax in the ward are tall and thin guys, some scholars believe that this is because the rapid growth of the lungs of long and thin body types causes lung ischemia and the formation of alveoli in the apical part of the lungs, and once the alveoli are broken, the pneumothorax will be pneumothorax. Just like a balloon that is already flawed is blown too fiercely, it will inevitably blow up.