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Pulmonary hamartoma is the most common tumor in benign lung neoplasm. We reviewed the clinical characteristics of 9 patients who had undergone surgical resection for pulmonary hamartoma between 2000 and 2009. There were 1 male and 8 female patients. The age of the patients ranged from 42 to 77 years old (mean 59). Calcification was not observed by computed tomography scan except in 1 patient. Although transbronchial lung biopsy (TBLB) was performed in 5 patients, no definitive diagnosis was obtained. Six patients underwent 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG)-positron emission tomography, and none of them showed any accumulation of FDG except for 1 patient. Concerning the operative procedures, a sleeve lobectomy was performed in 1 patient, a segmentectomy in 1, a lobectomy in 2, a partial resection of the lung in 3, and a nucleation in 2 patients. The postoperative courses were uneventful, and no findings of recurrence were observed in any of the patients after surgery. As a preoperative diagnosis of pulmonary hamartoma is often difficult in TBLB, it is necessary to perform surgical resection in the differential diagnosis of lung cancer or metastatic lung tumor, unless there are typical findings of pulmonary hamartoma in clinical imaging.

Human DNA topoisomerases I and IIalpha (Topo-I and -II alpha) are essential for vital cellular processes such as DNA replication, transcription, translation, recombination, and repair. The purpose of this study was to investigate the clinical significance of the expression of Topo-I and Topo-II alpha. Twenty-nine specimens of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma from patients who had been treated by complete resection of the esophageal tumor were studied by an immunohistochemical analysis. High expression of Topo I and II alpha was identified in 48.7% and 55.2% of tumors, respectively. Neither the Topo-I nor -II alpha expression level had any association with clinical characteristics, including differentiation and the depth of tumor invasion, lymph node metastasis, or the patient prognosis. However, a significant positive correlation was observed between the expression levels of Topo-I and Topo-II alpha. Our study results underscore the potential role of topoisomerase expression in esophageal cancer and further exploratory investigation is necessary to evaluate topoisomerase expression as a surrogate marker in chemotherapy with topoisomerase inhibitor for esophageal cancer.