Castleman's disease of the abdomen and pelvis: Report of three cases and a review of the literature

Abstract

Three cases of Castleman's disease (CD) of the abdomen and pelvis are reported. Tumoral lesions were located in the lymph nodes of the head of the pancreas, the gastropancreatic fold, and around the left iliac artery. Histologically, all the tumoral lesions demonstrated the hyalinevascular type of CD. This unusual presentation made CD difficult to diagnose preoperatively, since these lesions more closely resembled malignant tumors on computed tomography and angiography. We discuss the problems of diagnosing and classifying CD, together with a review of the literature.

A retrospective study of unicentric and multicentric Castleman’s disease: a report of 52 patients

“…An accurate staging of the disease should be performed in order to eliminate the possibility of MCD occurrence, and this can be achieved through clinical examination for the detection of suspicious lymph nodes in the axilla, neck, and groin and CT of the thorax. No recurrences have been reported after total excision [23][24][25][26][27][28][29]. Complete surgical excision is the mainstay of treatment and is virtually curative in all cases reported thus far, with a five-year survival rate approaching 100% [3,30].…”

Prolonged fever as an unusual manifestation of the hyaline vascular type of Castleman’s disease in the chest: report and review of the literature

“…The most common site is the mediastinum [4,8], followed by the neck, lung, retroperitoneum, pelvis, axilla, and abdomen [2,20]. Other reported locations are muscle, larynx, floor of the mouth, shoulder, arm, vulva, pericardium, and cranium [4,11,21].…”

“…It manifests as a local or generalized mass affecting both lymph nodes and nonnodal tissues [2]. It frequently involves mediastinum or pulmonary hilum [3].…”

Surgical management of abdominal and retroperitoneal Castleman's disease

“…Post-contrast IV study, while demonstrating dense enhancement of the mass, could demonstrate a central stellate scar [30,80]. Angiography shows a strongly hypervascular lesion, which present a dense and homogenous flush during the capillary phase [5,6,8,40,53,77,80]. This flush begins in periphery to become diffuse whiting the mass and is specific for the HV type of CD [77,80].…”

“…This flush begins in periphery to become diffuse whiting the mass and is specific for the HV type of CD [77,80]. It can also demonstrate hypertrophied feeding vessel, an useful information when resection is plan [8,53,77,80]. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) characteristics of CD are: hypodense mass on the T1 weighted study and hyperdense lesion on the T2 weighted image sometimes with star-shaped calcifications [60,77,80].…”