Laryngeal liposarcoma: report of a case

Laryngeal and hypopharyngeal liposarcomas are fairly rare tumors, with only 30 convincing cases reported to date. These tumors usually arise in the supraglottic area, and only two cases have been reported to affect the true vocal cord. They behave in an indolent fashion with multiple local recurrences and only rarely cause the patient's death. Our case highlights the natural history of this entity. A 62-year-old man presented because of air-way obstruction. A CT scan discovered a large 5 cm polypoid mass in the right aryepiglottic fold. The patient had already undergone three previous operations for the same reason in another clinic, with histopathological diagnoses of fibrovascular polyps. In the last recurrence, only a careful search for lipoblasts in the surgical specimen allowed us to identify this lesion as a low-grade well-differentiated liposarcoma. Complete resection was impossible in this case, despite total laryngectomy.