TY - JOUR
T1 - Twenty-one-year survival in an invasive thymoma successfully treated with seven-fold iterative surgery.
AU - Granone, Pierluigi
AU - Lococo, Filippo
AU - Margaritora, Stefano
AU - Cesario, Alfredo
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - A complete surgical resection is the cornerstone in the therapy of thymic tumors. Unfortunately, the recurrence of invasive thymoma is a frequent event and, to date, no standard therapeutic strategy has been validated. We report a case of a 48-year-old patient with an initial diagnosis of myasthenia gravis who underwent radical thymectomy and adjuvant radiotherapy in 1988 for an invasive thymoma. Six years after the first operation the patient was submitted to re-iterative surgery (pleural recurrence) and, as of the period from 1994 until today, the patient has been re-operated an additional five times. The last of these episodes, which we describe in this report, concerned a recurrence at the level of the sternum and the liver. To date the patient is alive and well, with no evidence of further relapse. We take the opportunity of this report to briefly discuss the re-iterative surgical strategy in repetitive recurrent invasive thymoma that we advocate as feasible and beneficial if survival is benchmarked, according to the experiences reported so far.
AB - A complete surgical resection is the cornerstone in the therapy of thymic tumors. Unfortunately, the recurrence of invasive thymoma is a frequent event and, to date, no standard therapeutic strategy has been validated. We report a case of a 48-year-old patient with an initial diagnosis of myasthenia gravis who underwent radical thymectomy and adjuvant radiotherapy in 1988 for an invasive thymoma. Six years after the first operation the patient was submitted to re-iterative surgery (pleural recurrence) and, as of the period from 1994 until today, the patient has been re-operated an additional five times. The last of these episodes, which we describe in this report, concerned a recurrence at the level of the sternum and the liver. To date the patient is alive and well, with no evidence of further relapse. We take the opportunity of this report to briefly discuss the re-iterative surgical strategy in repetitive recurrent invasive thymoma that we advocate as feasible and beneficial if survival is benchmarked, according to the experiences reported so far.
KW - timectomy
KW - timectomy
UR - http://hdl.handle.net/10807/5472
U2 - 10.1510/icvts.2010.237842
DO - 10.1510/icvts.2010.237842
M3 - Article
SN - 1010-7940
VL - 11
SP - 322
EP - 324
JO - European Journal of Cardio-thoracic Surgery
JF - European Journal of Cardio-thoracic Surgery
ER -