Mature Cystic Teratomas
Sharing you a few cases I've encountered so far. They come in a variety of sizes and content ranging from just being cysts with hair to the gross ones you see below.
We sample the cystic walls and the solid parts because these are the components that may contain may contain immature elements. The difference in prognosis between mature and immature teratomas is that the latter is malignant. So though the tumor looks bad at a glance like the one above, I didn't see any immature elements like brain tissue (most common one but any tissue can present as immature too).
It turned necrotic due to torsion. The blood supply got cut off due to its size and it became an emergency to take it out. Usually, benign ones are unilocar cysts but the one above made me suspect malignancy because multiple cyst walls were present upon opening.
This one is a benign case. The contents usually contain tufts of hair, sebum, tooth, bones, and all sorts of tissue from different parts of the body. As long as it's a mature teratoma, removing it would solve the problem. Chemotherapy is entertained when immature elements are found and rarely, other forms of cancer can arise from tumor itself.
If you made it this far reading, thank you for your time.
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I find it fascinating how they can differentiate into different cells.
It's like having body parts where they don't belong.
We have local folk superstition that these are like unformed twin due to hair and teeth because people in the rurals don't know any better once the tumor is taken out. Fascinating tumor, cells derived from the ectoderm are more often abundant than meso and endoderm layers.
I can see why they'd think that. It is kinda hard to explain why there are hair, teeth, etc. when they don't know what a teratoma is.
Ewwwwww! I've heard of these things as embryonic cysts but not seen one dissected before. Margaret Atwood once wrote a short story called "Hairball" that features one
Some are more sebum filled, some have more hair, and some just more fluid with a few strands to find. They all come in different forms but only the solid parts and screening for immature elements matters. :P
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So why don't other forms of cancer arise from tumor itself? Or is it just empircal?
It's a rare chance that they do and one such malignant tumor is in the form of squamous carcinoma. It's like a roll of the dice, a few chances of getting the disease due to a genetic mutation, and another roll for that mutation to trigger another set of mutations. Most teratomas I've encountered are benign but that's just my bias from experience.
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