Synchronous thymoma and oligodendroglioma: A rare association

Patients with thymoma are found to have another systemic illness and a broadly increased risk for secondary malignancies. We present the case of a 53-year-old female patient who harbored two synchronous primary malignant neoplasms-an anaplastic oligodendroglioma of the right frontal lobe and an anterior mediastinal thymoma.

A 53-year-old female patient presented in her first hospital admission with nausea, chest pain and non-pulsatile bitemporal headache. Continued headache and nausea along with negative cardiac findings prompted radiological evaluation including chest CT scan and brain CT scan which revealed simultaneous anterior mediastinal mass and frontal lobe calcification respectively. The patient underwent craniotomy and the pathological diagnosis was anaplastic oligodendriglioma. The anterior mediastinal tumor resection was performed three months later, while the patient had no newly onset of any symptoms necessitating more investigation.

Multiple primary malignancies have been diagnosed by the following criteria: each tumor must have an obvious picture of malignancy, each must be separate and discrete and the probability that one was a metastatic lesion from the other must be excluded. Treatment strategies in cases of double malignancy involve treating the malignancy that is more advanced first. In our case we concluded that synchronous double malignancy can be treated successfully according to the above mentioned criteria.

Clinicians should be aware of the possibility of synchronous malignancies in order to use screening procedures in patients with reported increased risk of double malignancy. Such clinical alertness may lead to a better outcome for double primary tumor cases.