1993 Volume 7 Issue 5 Pages 547-554
Sclerosing hemangioma of the lung was investigated immunohistochemically and clinicopathologically in 10 patients. Nine patients were women, and 8 of the 10 were in the fourth to sixth decades. All the patients were asymptomatic, and most of the lesions were discovered during routine screening. The lesions appeared as solitary round shadows in chest X-ray films, and prevalent lesion was middle lobe and left lower lobe. Chest X-ray tomography and chest CT were helpful to differentiate from cancer and fine needle aspiration cytology was useful for the diagnosis. The average tumor doubling time of four patients was 1254 days. This suggests that the tumor has slow growing nature. This disease clinically appears to be a benign lung tumor. In all the patients histopathological examination revealed proliferation of pale cells ; these occupied most of the tumor in half of the patients. Immunohistochemical studies showed some epithelial membrane antigen (EMA) was seen in the cell membrane of the pale cells in 9 patients and surfactant apoprotein (PE-10) was present slightly in the cytoplasm of the pale cells in only 3 patients. These findings only suggest that pale cells are derived from epithelial cells, and it is hard to say specifically that the origin is type II pneumocytes. Further case study is necessary to specify that pale cells are type II pneumocytes origin.
