Abstract
Chronic otitis media with cholesteatoma (Cholesteatoma) causes a much higher degree of bone destruction as compared with chronic otitis media without cholesteatoma (N on-cholesteatoma), resulting in destruction of the auditory ossicles, semicircular canal, facial canal and tegmen, and causing conductive deafness, inner ear disturbance and intracranial complication. Thus numerous investigations have long been performed on the etiology and mechanism of bone destruction in cholesteatoma.
To date, pressure, circulatory disturbance du to inflammation, biochemical reactions such as enzyme activities within inflammatory granulation tissue or involvement of the epithelium have been proposed as the mechanism of bone destruction in cholesteatoma. In addition, studies have been made of the involvement of cells (such as fibroblast-like cells, osteoclasts, osteocytes, osteoblasts, macrophages, neutrophils, etc.) that appear at the site of bone destruction, but pathology specific to cholesteatoma has not been fully elucidated.
In this paper, we discuss our histological study using experimental cholesteatoma-like lesion in mongolian gerbils and human cholesteatoma with special attention to the cells that appear at the site of bone destruction in cholesteatoma as well as briefly review the literature as an effort to elucidate some of the mechanism of bone destruction in cholesteatoma.
