All issues > Volume 35(10); 1992

Case Report

J Korean Pediatr Soc. 1992;35(10):1435-1442. Published online October 15, 1992.

Five Cases of Thymic Hyperplasia

Soo Kyoung SK Lee¹, Soo Young SY Lee¹, Kyu Eun KE Kim¹, Byung Ju BJ Chung¹, Ki Young KY Lee¹

¹Department of Pediatrics, Yon Sei University, College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea

Abstract

Diagnosis of thymic hyperplasia may be quite difficult because thymus has not always sail appearance and it sometimes appears to be a huge mass in the mediastinum. This fact causes sometimes diagnostic thoracotomy or often make primary physicians fail in treatment and transfer their patients to other hospitals. But in most cases diagnosis can be made by a lateral chest X-ray and lung tomography as in our cases. Additional computed tomography or ultrasonography confirms diagnosis, remarkable reduction in size of thymus after administration of a few day's corticosteroid has some diagnostic value. We experienced thymic hyperplasia in five infants whose chief complaints were chronic respiratory symptoms and mediastinal mass shadows on the chest roentgenograms and diagnosed by nonoperative methods such as lung tomogram, chest ultrasonogram, chest CT scan and short term administration of corticosteroid.

Keywords :Thymic hyperplasia, Lung tomography, Computed tomography