Negative pressure pulmonary edema (NPPE) is a clinical syndrome well described in the literature and easy to recognize in cases of suspicion, but probably underdiagnosed. It can be a cause of morbidity and admission to the intensive care unit of healthy young individuals. It is present in approximately one in every thousand anesthetics and in 10% of the episodes of upper airway obstruction that are observed in routine clinical practice. It is a non-cardiogenic form of pulmonary oedema thought to be caused by the highly negative intra-thoracic pressure generated when trying to breathe against an acute obstruction.

We report a case of NPPE after an airway obstruction in a young male patient.