Hypertrophic pulmonary osteoarthropathy in a child with thymic carcinoma: An Unusual presentation in childhood

Abstract

We report here a case of intrathoracic undifferentiated carcinoma in the thymus with hypertrophic pulmonary osteoarthropathy in a 13-year-old girl. The association of the two conditions is very rare.

Surgical management of thymic epithelial tumors in children: Lessons from the French Society of pediatric oncology and review of the literature

“…The other paraneoplastic syndromes consisted of hypertrophic pulmonary osteoarthropathy, hypogammaglobulinemia/Good's syndrome, polymyositis [25], nephritic syndrome [25] and lupus syndrome. Paraneoplastic syndromes have been reported in subtypes B1 and B2 thymoma [21][22]24], B3 thymoma [23] and C TET [18,[25][26][27]. Distant metastases were present at diagnosis in 13 cases, corresponding to 11 cases of subtype C and two cases of subtype B3 [9,25,[28][29][30].…”

Thymic carcinoma in children

“…Only two pediatric cases were described in 19 clinopathological studies including 305 cases analyzed by Chung [13]. In English literature, we could find only 14 cases [5,7,12,[14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22] younger than 18 years of age that were either single case reports or existed in case series (Table I). In some series of TEN, no age was mentioned for the reported cases [11], while in some other series containing adult and pediatric cases, no diagnostic differentiation was made between thymoma and carcinoma [9,10].…”

“…Myasthenia gravis and other paraneoplastic syndromes are rarely associated with thymic carcinomas. Of the 14 cases reviewed, 1 had systemic lupus erythamatosus [20], 1 had scleroderma [21], and 3 had hypertrophic osteoarthropathy [15,19,20]. Since thymic carcinomas occur rarely in children, experiences on treatment come from adult series.…”

Carcinoma tímico en niños. Informe de dos casos

“…En niños se han descrito casos relacionados con esclerodermia, lupus eritematoso, osteoartropatía hipertrófica, polimiositis, eritrodermia, síndrome de Sjögren y síndrome nefrótico. 9,10,[17][18][19] Radiológicamente puede haber derrame pleural e invasión a la pleura y al pericardio. 3 La tomografía axial computada contrastada es el estudio de elección para los tumores tímicos.…”