Prenatal Detection of a Congenital Pancreatic Cyst by Ultrasound

Abstract

We present a case of a fetal pancreatic cyst, a rare disease in fetal life, detected prenatally at 30 weeks' gestation by ultrasound. Routine ultrasound examination at 30 weeks' gestation by primary obstetrician showed a cyst on the fetal abdomen. Initially, the suspected diagnosis was a mesenteric cyst. Subsequent ultrasound examination at weeks 32, 36 showed a fetal retroperitoneal cyst. A 3.6 kg female neonate was born to 23 yr old woman by spontaneous vaginal delivery at 38 weeks' gestation. The fetus underwent exploratory laparotomy. Histopathologic and immunohistochemical diagnosis revealed the cyst to be a pancreatic cyst. Surgical outcome was excellent. Thus, we report this case of a pancreatic cyst detected via prenatal ultrasonography.

Multiple Congenital Pancreatic Cysts in a Neonate

“…Unlike our case with multifocal cysts located in the pancreatic head and tail, Choi et al 13) reported that an isolated 56×47 mm homogenous cyst originating from the pancreatic tail was excised with a distal pancreatectomy. However, excision of the cyst is not always the treatment of choice for all patients.…”

A large congenital pancreatic cyst mimicking a macrocytic lymphatic malformation

“…The neonate expired shortly after delivery due to respiratory failure from pulmonary hypoplasia . Twenty-one reports of prenatally diagnosed lesions have since been published [6] , [7] , [8] , [9] , [10] , [11] , [12] , [13] , [14] , [15] , [16] , [17] , [18] , [19] , [20] , [21] , [22] , [23] , [24] and ours provides the 22nd. These cases primarily describe CPCs as simple-appearing, unilocular cysts of various sizes in the upper abdomen.…”

How to differentiate congenital pancreatic cysts and cystic pancreatic teratomas?

“…Complete resection or enucleation should be performed whenever possible, with maximum preservation of the pancreatic tissue [2,4,12,19,22,25,27,32,33,[35][36][37][42][43][44][45]. Distal pancreatectomy is possible when the cyst is located into the pancreatic tail [13,15,17,21,28,31,40,48]. When the cyst is in the pancreatic head, complete removal is not always possible.…”