A mysterious and rather coarse photo of a man's blood clot is receiving much attention after the New England Journal of Medicine has shared it on Twitter.
The clot was spat by a 36-year-old man suffering from chronic heart failure, according to the peer-reviewed medical journal. He died shortly thereafter. What is so bizarre about the clot is that it is a cast of its right bronchial tree – which does not really happen. It would have been more understandable if the clot had come out in parts, but the fact that it was so complete is surprising, Georg Wieselthaler, a transplant and pulmonary surgeon at the University of California in San Francisco, has declared to the Atlantic.
"It's a curiosity you can not imagine – I mean, it's very, very, very rare," he told the Atlantic.
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There was a case of a 25-year-old pregnant woman who coughed a small cast of her bronchial tree, and later continued to recover and give birth to a healthy baby, according to a 2005 report in the European Journal of Cardio – Thoracic surgery. A 34-year-old woman was cited in 1926 while coughing with a jet of trachea, both bronchi and several bronchioles, according to a study by The Journal of America Medical Association. She died the day after.
In the case of this man, he died of heart failure complications a week after doctors tried to stop the bleeding and open his airways with a breathing tube.
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