Rhabdomyomas are a very rare benign tumor. We report herein on a case of rhabdomyoma arising from the thyroarytenoid muscle. A 73-year-old man visited our hospital with the chief complaint of hoarseness. Laryngoscopy showed a smooth swelling of the left vocal cord. No other abnormalities, including recurrent nerve paralysis, were observed. In imaging examinations, CT revealed a lesion involving two subsites from the supraglottic to the glottic regions in coronal sections, and MRI showed paraglottic space invasion, whereas the thyroid cartilage was preserved; and malignancy was suspected. We performed a laryngomicrosurgery under general anesthesia to make a diagnosis by biopsy. A rapid intraoperative diagnosis of the biopsied tissues revealed a benign tumor, and a diagnosis of rhabdomyoma was made based on the permanent pathologic findings. While growth of rhabdomyomas is slow and rarely causes problems, dyspnea and airway narrowing may develop due to tumor progression in some cases. Our patient was an elderly individual and had no difficulty breathing or desire to improve his hoarseness, so we took a wait-and-see approach. He has been followed up on an outpatient basis for 21 months since his first visit, with good progress. In this report, we describe the course of this patient along with a review of literature.
