Abstract
Pleuropulmonary blastoma (PPB) is a very rare intrathoracic malignancy in childhood. It is an aggressive embryonal or blastemic neoplasm usually occurring in children younger than five years of age. PPB is treated with aggressive multimodal therapies consisting of surgery and chemotherapy. We present a case with PPB type II successfully treated with complete surgical resection following neoadjuvant chemotherapy. She has been free of disease for 33 months of follow-up. Complete surgical resection of the tumor at the time of diagnosis is the cornerstone of PPB management, but in the majority of patients, initial surgery is incomplete because a large tumor may involve vital structures. For this reason, patients with initially unresectable tumors should be treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy to reduce the lesion to the point that it becomes resectable.
Copyright and license
Copyright © 2009 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, provided the original work is properly cited.