Burkitt's lymphoma in a young Brazilian boy

Burkitt's lymphoma is not an uncommon malignancy in the paediatric population. It is a high-grade non-Hodgkin B-cell lymphoma which may present as endemic, sporadic and human immunodeficiency-associated subtypes. The African, or endemic, variant usually involves the maxilla and other facial bones while head and neck manifestations in sporadic Burkitt's lymphoma are rare. We described a case of oral Burkitt's lymphoma involving the right jaw in a 4-year-old boy. The patient presented with a rapidly-enlarging swelling of one month duration, toothache-like pain and radiographical appearance of 'floating teeth' in the right mandible. Incisional biopsy revealed small round tumour cells with scarce cytoplasm and multiple small nuclei interspersed by phagocytic macrophages. The tumour cells were immunopositivity for CD20 and CD10, expressed weak positivity for CD3, negative for CD5 and showed > 90% positivity for Ki-67. Tumour remission was achieved with six cycles of chemotherapy with the CHOP regime.