Primary Frontoparietal Osteosarcoma

Osteosarcoma and Epidermoid Cyst in the Cerebellopontine Angle of an Adult

BACKGROUND

Osteosarcoma is a common malignant bone tumor that occurs in children or adolescents but rarely in the skull. Epidermoid cysts, also known as cholesteatomas, represent approximately 0.2%-1.8% of all intracranial tumors. The occurrence of osteosarcoma with an epidermoid cyst is extremely rare.

CASE DESCRIPTION

A 41-year-old woman had both osteosarcoma and cholesteatoma in the left cerebellopontine angle. We resected the 2 tumors using the suboccipital retrosigmoid approach, and she received radiotherapy and chemotherapy after the surgery. One year after surgery, the patient is healthy and has recovered well.

CONCLUSIONS

Osteosarcomas and epidermoid cysts should be completely resected to prevent tumor recurrence and aseptic meningitis. Postoperative osteosarcoma treatment should include radiotherapy and chemotherapy to improve the survival rate of patients. It is hoped that this report will help clinicians in diagnosis and treatment of patients with similar conditions.

Primary osteosarcoma of the skull in teenager

Osteosarcoma of the skull is a rare primary malignant bone tumour in children, representing 1-2% of all cranial tumours. We describe a case of a 17-year-old adolescent with chondroblastic osteosarcoma of the parietal-occipital bone and no distant metastases at presentation treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy, surgery and, later, concurrent chemoradiotherapy. The patient suffered progressive disease and died 15 months after diagnosis. There are at least 15 paediatric cases of osteosarcoma of the skull described in the literature. Due to its rarity, there are no broad prospective studies on this entity, which has distinctive features when compared to other craniofacial tumours, carrying a worse prognosis. Complete surgical resection is needed for long-term survival, whereas chemotherapy and radiotherapy have still questionable indications.

What's that big thing on your head? Diagnosis of a large frontoparietal lesion on an Eastern Zhou skull from Henan, China

We carried out a differential diagnosis of a large frontoparietal lesion on a human skull from a Late Bronze Age archaeological site located on the Central Plain of China, dating to between 771 and 476 BC. The head of this individual was covered in cinnabar, a mercury-based pigment that later was used for medicinal purposes in China. The lesion was well-circumscribed and involved the outer and inner tables of the skull, slight diploë thickening, and coarsening of bone trabeculae with expansion of intertrabecular spaces. We show that the observed changes are most consistent with cavernous hemangioma of the skull, a benign vascular malformation that preferentially affects older adults. Hemangiomas are often neglected in the paleopathological literature because of their benign nature - they tend to be asymptomatic and do not affect quality of life to a significant degree. Nevertheless, they produce characteristic lesions that can be confused with several other conditions with unrelated etiologies, including congenital hemoglabinopathies, traumas, malignant or benign neoplasms, and Paget's disease. We outline the diagnostic criteria that distinguish cavernous hemangioma from other conditions affecting the skull.