Pulmonary artery leiomyosarcoma: an unusual cause of shortness of breath

Abstract

Primary pulmonary artery leiomyosarcoma is easily confused clinically with pulmonary thromboembolism and most cases are diagnosed post mortem. Most tumours arise in the pulmonary trunk and metastases are only rarely described. The management of patients with this rare tumour depends on early surgical resection and the prognosis is unfavourable.

Primary Pulmonary Artery Leiomyosarcoma with Pulmonary Metastasis Depicted on Enhanced Computer Tomography: A Case Description and an Analysis of the Literature

“…We summarized the gender, age, symptoms, and initial diagnosis results of PAL in 18 cases from previous 17 English language articles in the PubMed database [1,2,4,[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. The results are shown in Table 1.…”

“…According to the previous literature reports, it is recommended that patients with incomplete resection and malignant tumors should be treated with radiotherapy and chemotherapy and the survival period of patients can be extended to 20 months through receiving adjuvant chemotherapy and radiotherapy after surgery [29]. If the patient can undergo complete resection at the early stage of the tumor, the five-year survival rate is close to 50% and there are reports of 20-year survival rates after resection [1,2,4,[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20].…”

“…To date, a total of 18 cases of PAL have been reported in English language articles in the PubMed database [1,2,4,[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] and research on PAL is limited. The computed tomography (CT) findings and differential diagnosis, treatment, and outcome of PAL have not been thoroughly investigated.…”

Leiomyosarcoma of the pulmonary artery diagnosed by endobronchial ultrasound-guided transbronchial needle aspiration

“…Historically, most cases of pulmonary artery tumors were diagnosed with surgery[ 9 10 11 12 ] or during postmortem examination. [ 13 14 ] Successful diagnosis of primary pulmonary artery leiomyosarcoma with catheterization and biopsy has also been reported. [ 15 ] In the last few years, several cases of primary[ 16 17 ] and metastatic[ 1 2 3 4 5 6 ] pulmonary artery tumors diagnosed by EBUS-TBNA have been reported without any procedure-related complications.…”