Lingual Abscess in a Young, Healthy Woman Patient

Abstract

A lingual abscess is a rare , potentially lifethreatening disorder. It may present with nonspecific symptoms such as pain, odynophagia, dysphagia, or difficulty in breathing. 1 It may develop idiopathically or secondary to a local trauma, foreign bodies, and surgical trauma. 2 Physical examination usually shows swollen tongue and tenderness. The abscess might be located at the lateral border, anterior 1/3, or posterior 1/3 of the tongue. 3 Although plain radiograms usually do not give valuable information, both magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) might show abscess. Treatment mainly focuses on airway protection, appropriate antibiotic usage, and drainage. With appropriate treatment, mortality due to lingual abscess is seen in less than 3% of cases. 4 CASE REPORTA 30-year-old female admitted to our outpatient clinic with odynophagia, dysphagia, pain, and tenderness in her tongue. Her complaints were existing for 5 days and getting worse. She did not use any medication before applying to the hospital. She did not have any trauma, surgical, or dental procedure history. She did not have any history of illness, medication usage, smoking, and alcohol consumption. Physical examination revealed swollen tongue with hyperemia in tongue base, with the normal flexible laryngoscopy examination. Oral hygiene was good, and tonsils were at a normal size without any infection signs. She was afebrile (36.6C). After the patient had been hospitalized, laboratory and

Atypical Tongue Abscesses Mimicking Submucosal Malignancies: A Review of the Literature Focusing on Diagnostic Challenges

“…The same paper (dated 2011) also provided a table with all the recent cases of oral abscesses from the literature with the culture results available: this review was in line with their case, documenting various and often miscellaneous bacterial isolations and some cases in which no microorganism growth was detected. Surprisingly, some authors did not report an attempt at bacterial isolation, but this could be attributable to both logistic difficulties or a negative result that was not specified in the publication [9,14,24].…”