A 17-month-old girl who had been followed up as an extremely-low-birth-weight infant presented with hepatoblastoma in the right lobe of her liver. Preoperative angiography revealed an absence of the portal vein, and the visceral venous return was through the left renal vein into the inferior vena cava. No liver dysfunction and no jaundice were found; however, a marked elevation of the alpha-fetoprotein level was noted. She underwent a typical right hepatic lobectomy successfully after chemotherapy and has no evidence of recurrence 6 months after surgery.

For the treatment of uncomplicated intussusception in infants and children, we attempted air reduction without x-ray study to avoid the genetic and carcinogenic effects of radiation. Intussusception could generally be diagnosed by ultrasonography in addition to the history and typical clinical signs without using a barium enema. The success of reduction could also be safely evaluated from the disappearance of both the characteristic sonographic target sign and the abdominal palpable mass, and improvement in the general condition 2 or 3 hours after completing this procedure. This simple, cheap and clean reduction method was applied to 127 patients under strict indications and sedation with diazepam. The successful reduction rate was high (90.6%) and equal to that by hydrostatic reduction. Accordingly, this procedure appears to be safely applicable to the management of uncomplicated intussusception in infancy and childhood.

A male infant presenting with paraplegia due to intraspinal extension of an endodermal sinus tumour in the posteroinferior mediastinum is reported. Dumbbell tumours are usually observed in mediastinal neuroblastomas, and rarely in rhabdomyosarcomas of the chest wall. The present case demonstrates the clinical similarity of endodermal sinus tumours to neuroblastomas with extradural extension. Therefore, endodermal sinus tumours should be considered in the differential diagnosis of posterior mediastinal masses, because of the distinctly different treatment from that for other tumours.