Abstract
Malignant lymphoma of the nasal cavity is a relatively rare disease, and has been reported to occur more frequently in the nasal cavity than in the paranasal sinuses. Herein, we report a case of malignant lymphoma of a paranasal sinus.
The patient was an 89-year-old male presenting with the chief complaint is an upper right toothache. He was referred to the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial of our hospital with suspected odontogenic maxillary sinusitis. The sixth upper right tooth was extracted because of purulent apical periodontitis. However, a paranasal sinus CT revealed destruction of the right maxillary sinus, and the patient was referred to our department. Since bone destruction was the only abnormal finding detected on the paranasal sinus CT and MRI, we suspected the existence of a tumor, and performed endoscopic sinus surgery and lateral rhinotomy for a definitive diagnosis. At surgery, we detected a tumor-like lesion, which was confirmed by subsequent histopathological examination to be a diffuse large B-cell lymphoma.
A re-examination of the imaging findings revealed a number of radiographic features of malignant lymphoma with moderate bone destruction, which was also one of the features of malignant lymphoma. For malignant lymphoma of the paranasal sinuses, as in this reported case, CT of the paranasal sinuses may be useful for preoperative diagnosis.
