© 2004 BMJ Publishing Group Ltd & British Association of Sport and Exercise Medicine
EDITORIAL
Medical certification of professional divers
Should computed tomography of the chest be recommended in the medical certification of professional divers?
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr Millar
The Alfred Hyperbaric Service, PO Box 315, Prahran, Victoria 3181, Australia; i.millar@alfred.org.au
Chest CT should not be used in the assessment of fitness to dive
Keywords: diving; certification; computed tomography; chest
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Toklu et al1 have raised the question of whether routine high resolution computed tomographic (CT) scanning of the chest should form part of the initial diving medical examination for occupational divers. The authors make this proposition in discussing their series of three divers in which pulmonary abnormalities were discovered on high resolution CT scan after occupational diving incidents. One case involved a bulla, the second multiple air cysts, and the last a subpleural bleb. The authors assume that the initial mechanism of injury in each case was pulmonary barotrauma associated with the lesions revealed.
One could argue whether the second and third cases may have involved arterialisation of venous bubbles rather than pulmonary barotrauma, but any uncertainty does not invalidate consideration of the authors’ contentions. It is widely agreed that lung cysts, bullae, and blebs may all predispose to pulmonary barotrauma, and most authorities recommend
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