Upper mediastinal tumor

Tumors are some of the more common physical problems in people's body structure today. There are many types of tumors that people are not familiar with in their daily lives. For example, upper mediastinal tumors. Upper mediastinal tumor is a relatively common tumor that mainly appears in people's chest. Among them, the most common one is thymoma. This has a great impact on people's physical condition. So when you have an upper mediastinal tumor, what should you do to solve it?

1. What is an upper mediastinal tumor?

There are many forms of upper mediastinal tumors, but the most common is a thymoma.

Thymomas account for approximately 20% to 40% of all mediastinal tumors in adults. Thymomas arise from the thymic epithelium but exclude tumors arising from lymphocytes, neuroendocrine cells, germ cells, and adipose tissue. In most cases, thymomas are located in the anterior mediastinum and attached to the pericardium. Only a few thymomas can occur outside the mediastinum, such as the pleura and pericardium.

Symptoms of thymoma

1. About 30% to 60% of thymoma patients have no obvious symptoms and are only discovered to have thymoma during an accidental chest X-ray examination. The clinical manifestations of symptomatic patients are mainly local chest symptoms caused by tumor invasion or compression of adjacent mediastinal structures, including cough, chest pain, wheezing, recurrent respiratory tract infections, dyspnea, dysphagia, hoarseness, etc. At the same time, systemic symptoms include fever, weight loss, fatigue, loss of appetite, night sweats, etc.

2. Thymoma has its own unique manifestations, with symptoms of combined multiple paraneoplastic syndromes: the most common are myasthenia gravis; erythroid dysplasia; polymyositis; systemic lupus erythematosus; rheumatoid arthritis; thyroiditis and other diseases. Some studies have found that patients with thymoma have a higher chance of developing a second primary tumor than other people.

3. Thymoma precautions

Thymoma is different from other tumors. If it is based solely on histology, it is impossible to determine the benign or malignant nature of thymoma. Therefore, the benign or malignant nature of thymoma needs to be judged based on the presence or absence of capsule infiltration, invasion of surrounding organs or distant metastasis. It is currently believed that all thymomas are potentially malignant. In medicine, we advocate dividing thymomas into two types: non-invasive and invasive. Generally speaking, only 30% to 40% of thymomas are invasive.