Primary sebaceous carcinoma of the head and neck region is extremely rare. Herein, we report a case of sebaceous carcinoma of the external auditory canal. A 66-year-old man presented with a feeling of ear fullness and a mass in the right external auditory canal. An incisional biopsy was performed and the histopathological diagnosis was malignancy, either basal cell adenocarcinoma or sebaceous carcinoma. The patient was treated by lateral temporal bone resection without any complications. The final diagnosis based on histopathological examination of the resected specimen was sebaceous carcinoma of the external auditory canal. At 21 months after the surgery, the patient was alive, with no evidence of tumor recurrence or metastasis.
We encountered 6 patients with stage T1 or T2 carcinoma of the external auditory canal. All patients underwent treatment, including by lateral temporal bone resection. One patient died of the disease with local/distant metastases and another died of an unrelated disease, however, the remaining 4 patients were alive without any evidence of recurrence until the last follow-up. This result revealed that lateral temporal bone resection is a good treatment option for stage T1 and T2 carcinoma of the external auditory canal.
