A 62 years old patient developed myasthenia gravis 2 years after his percutaneous coronary intervention. He was advised thymectomy for myasthenia gravis. During his cardiological evaluation, he was incidentally diagnosed to have 3 vessel disease. Hence, a simultaneous surgical intervention was performed consisting of thymectomy and CABG via standard cardiopulmonary bypass through median sternot...

BACKGROUND Myasthenia gravis (MG) is an autoimmune disease involving the formation of antibodies against the nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. Thymectomy is the treatment in MG patients with thymoma. We report a case of an MG patient who developed postthymectomy bilateral pneumothoraces after the placement of a subclavian central venous catheter. CASE REPORT The 21-year-old patient with MG u...

Thirteen patients with myasthenia gravis underwent total thymectomy between January, 1988 and December, 1991. The duration of symptoms prior to surgery varied from 2 months to 20 years. In a follow-up ranging from 2 months to 4 years, 11 patients showed a significant improvement with either complete discontinuation of medication or a marked reduction in doses. One patient with a small benign th...

Adult thymectomy has been shown to result in the enhanced capacity of splenic T cells to respond to and lyse syngeneic tumor cells in vitro. In addition, T cells from thymectomized mice which kill syngeneic tumor cells do not lyse either normal lymphoid or mitogen-stimulated syngeneic lymphoblast target cells. These findings indicate that the thymus exports a subpopulation of T cells sensitive ...

Past studies have shown that thymectomy in the mouse at 3 days of age but not at birth or after 7 days produces, in later life, a variety of localized autoimmune lesions. In the present work, 3-day thymectomy facilitated subsequent sarcogenesis by low dosages of 3-methylcholanthrene but inhibited oncogenesis by a high dosage. If the presence of autoimmunity implies an increased antitumor immuni...

The effects of neonatal thymectomy and antilymphocyte serum (ALS) treatment on the transplantability of a human leukemia were studied in hamsters of varying ages. This tumor, H-HM-1, is normally transplantable only in ALS-treated neonatal hamsters. Multiple doses of ALS prolonged the period of susceptibility to tumor implantation, as compared to a single dose at the time of tumor inoculation. N...

Thymoma is an epithelial neoplasm of the thymus, which commonly lies in the anterior mediastinum and recurrences of thymoma generally are locally, and retroperitoneal recurrence is considered to be rare. A 46-year old Asian woman with invasive thymoma had undergone thymectomy 10 years ago. Computed tomography demonstrated a well-circumscribed mass in the left retroperitoneal space. The patient ...

BACKGROUND Myasthenia gravis (MG) and neuromyelitis optica (NMO, also known as Devic disease) are rare autoimmune disorders, with upper-limit prevalence estimates in the general population of 15 per 100,000 and 5 per 100,000, respectively. To our knowledge, an association between these diseases has not been previously reported. OBJECTIVES To describe 4 patients with MG who developed NMO after...