We report a 40-year-old woman with recurrent thymoma associated with myasthenia gravis, in whom an unusual form of erythroderma developed. A histological examination revealed a graft-versus-host disease (GVHD)-like reaction. After high-dose steroid therapy, the metastatic thymoma lesion in the abdominal cavity was reduced in size from 9.5 x 6 x 7.5 cm to 4 x 3 x 1 cm in diameter. Nevertheless, ...

We developed a highly sensitive enzyme immunoassay (EIA) for measuring IgG and IgM antibodies against human skeletal muscle (SM) component and tested sera from 100 patients with myasthenia gravis (MG), 59 with thymoma and 41 without thymoma. We found that the frequency of anti-SM IgG antibodies was significantly higher in MG patients with (81%) than without (37%) thymoma. The titers of the anti...

Spontaneous thymoma was found in the left lobe of the thymus of a male 10-week-old Sprague-Dawley (SD) rat. Microscopically, the thymic mass showed a sheet of dark area with multiple pale foci. The dark area mainly consisted of densely compacted small lymphoid cells with sporadic large epithelioid cells and mitotic figures. The epithelioid cells and mitotic figures were more frequent than those...

A forty-nine-year-old female patient, complaining of swallowing difficulties and general fatigue, was admitted to the first hospital of Nippon Medical School. At the age of 32, she was operated on for the removal of a well encapsulated non-invasive thymoma. Since then, she had been well till the age of 46, when chest X-ray films showed a recurrent thymoma which was excised together with the com...

Pure red cell aplasia is a rare cause of anemia, caused by an absence of red blood cell precursors in the bone marrow. It is usually a paraneoplastic syndrome, associated most commonly with large-cell granular lymphocyte leukemia but also thymoma. For patients who present both pure red cell aplasia and thymoma, thymectomy leads to an initial remission of the aplasia in 30% of cases. However, su...

Aplastic anemia is an uncommon complication of thymoma and is extremely infrequent after the surgical removal of a thymic tumor. Aplastic anemia is a result of marrow failure and is characterized by peripheral pancytopenia and severely depressed marrow cellularity; it may be an autoimmune manifestation of thymoma. As thymoma-associated hematological dyscrasias, which include pure red cell aplas...

Acquired pure red cell aplasia (PRCA) is a rare disorder of erythropoiesis that can develop in association with a thymoma. Optimal management of this subgroup is unclear, and there have been few series reporting long-term clinical outcomes. Here, we report features of 13 patients treated for PRCA associated with thymoma over 50 years at our institution. Surgical resection of the thymoma was ins...

Although historically thymoma and thymic carcinoma have been treated surgically, radiation therapy also has an important role, either as postoperative therapy to reduce the risk of mediastinal recurrence or as part of definitive treatment for patients who cannot undergo surgery. Induction chemotherapy and molecular targeted agents may also be appropriate for thymic carcinoma, the behavior of wh...

We describe a 34-year old man presenting with subacute generalized myasthenic symptoms. His clinical features and laboratory investigations demonstrated both myasthenia gravis and myotonic dystrophy type 1. The computerized tomography of chest revealed anterior mediastinal mass. The lymphocyte-rich thymoma was removed surgically and he received radiotherapy. Recent observations suggested that t...

Good's syndrome is a rare cause of immunodeficiency in adults associated with thymoma. We describe an 80-year-old female with chronic diarrhea, multiple opportunistic infections, and cytopenias. She underwent a thymectomy 5 years ago for a thymoma. Laboratory tests revealed neutropenia, hypogammaglobulinaemia, complete B-cell lymphopenia, and low CD4 T cells with inverted CD4:CD8 ratio, which i...