Study shows considerable replacement of the thymus with adipose tissue. The lesion is large forming a mediastinal mass.
A thymolipoma is an unusual benign mediastinal tumor, representing 5% of thymic neoplasms.
It occurs throughout life, average age of 22 years.
It usually is asymptomatic but can compress adjacent structures and can result in shortness of breath, chest pain or cough in up to 25% of patients.
It is composed of adipose tissue mixed with thymic tissue on histology and on imaging may be purely fat or mixed with soft tissue of thymic density or signal.
These lesions may be quite small or very large.
If asymptomatic, no treatment is needed.
The only therapy in symptomatic patients is removal.
These lesions are associated with myasthenia gravis, aplastic anemia, hypogamma-globulinemia, Hodgkin’s disease and chronic lymphocytic leukemia.
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| VCU Resident |
| Radiology |
Pediatrics |
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| Susan Back |
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| Jeremy Camden |
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| Bradford Moore |
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| Others |
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| Nishard Abdeen | Canada |
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| Ahmed Abdelaal | Egypt |
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| Amer Alaref | Canada |
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| Dr. Khaled AlSherbeny | Egypt |
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| Vijay Arora | India |
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| Ali Attia | Egypt |
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| Bakhtiar Bakhshi | Turkey |
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| Jezreel Costa | Brazil |
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| Waleed Farah | Jordan |
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| Omar Hassanien | Egypt |
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| Ramazan Jafari | Iran |
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| Naganathan Mani | United States of America |
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| Aaron Nordgren | United States of America |
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| Robert Palmer | United States of America |
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| Faisal Shadab | India |
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| Chad St. Germain | United States of America |
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