A case report of a 52-year-old woman presenting with shortness of breath and left lower back pain, unresponsive to empirical antibiotics for suspected consolidation.
Persistent consolidation unresponsive to antibiotics warrants tissue diagnosis to exclude rare primary pulmonary Hodgkin lymphoma; leaves open standardized management pathways.
CASE PRESENTATION: A 52-year-old woman presented to the clinic with progressively worsening shortness of breath associated with intermittent pleuritic left lower back pain for the past 6 months. The patient denied any cough, hemoptysis, fever, chills, or weight loss. She had a history of smoking cigarettes for more than 10 years but quit almost 20 years ago. An outpatient chest radiograph was obtained, and it suggested consolidation of the left lower lobe. The patient was treated empirically with amoxicillin-clavulanate for 2 weeks without improvement.
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Badar et al. (2025) studied this question.
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