Pulmonary edema following acute upper airway obstruction

During recovery, our patient presented an acute upper airway occlusion. After the removal of the airway obstruction, he developed a massive bilateral pulmonary edema with an acute hypoxemia. Hemodynamic measures following this incident show that mean and wedged pulmonary pressures are in the normal ranges. Several cases, associating acute upper airway obstruction, massive bilateral pulmonary edema and low or normal filling pressures, have been reported in literature. Three mechanisms have been postulated to explain this phenomenon; a dramatic increase of the negativity of the interstitial pulmonary pressure, a significative augmentation of the after-load and the hypoxic pulmonary reflex vasoconstriction.