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Cysts of the thyroglossal duct form the congenital, not odontogenetic, more frequent malformations of neck and head pathology. In percentage terms one percent developed a carcinoma, usually of good prognosis. This paper reports the case of a woman, 41, who was operated upon of a thyroglossal duct cyst and in the eradicated piece showed a papillary carcinoma invading neighbouring tissues. Treatment was completed, in a second time, with a complete thyroidectomy and a the papillary carcinoma was discovered. Some interesting aspects regarding diagnosis and treatment of this scarce entity are reviewed.

Voice disorders in children are often described as existing on a continuum with anatomic or physiologic causes at one end and functional or psychogenic causes at the other. In this study we report the objective evaluation of the voice disorders on 48 school children. The evaluation was made by means of laryngostroboscopy, acoustic analysis of the voice and narrow-band spectrography. The stroboscopic examination was performed on more than a half of the patients, resulting in the change of diagnose in six cases. The severity of the hoarseness was classified in four groups according Yanagihara method. A multivariate analysis was carried out using jitter, shimmer and harmonic-to-noise ratio as variables. Only the harmonic-to-noise ratio predicts the severity of the spectrographic record. Classification of degrees of hoarseness is found to be clinically useful in two respects: the degree of hoarseness can be numerically expressed and the objective acoustic degree of hoarseness based on this method closely agrees with subjective perceived degree of hoarseness.

Non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) comprise 7-10% of all malignant tumors in childhood. Early systems of classification (Rappaport, Luke-Collins) have been improved with the Working Formulation. NHL are classified into low, intermediate and high-grade disease. Head and neck manifestations of Burkitt's lymphoma are encountered in less than a quarter of the reported cases and usually present as cervical adenopathy. Parapharyngeal space and extranodal disease are unusual sites of involvement. We present a case of tonsillar lymphoma diagnosed with fine-needle biopsy and confirmed with excisional biopsy. Accurate staging (stage IV) and chemotherapy regimen was promptly begun. We review the clinical aspects, pathologic features and treatment of this disease.

Paragangliomas of the head and neck are rare tumors of neuroectodermal origin. However, jugulotympanic paragangliomas are the second most common tumor of the temporal bone. Paragangliomas are recognized as benign tumors, but some show a biological behavior similar to that of malignant lesions, such as the development of recurrence or invasive growth patterns. We report 31 patients with a total of 35 paragangliomas who were seen in our department. Multiple paragangliomas were found in 2 patients. Twenty-two patients had jugulotympanic paragangliomas, 11 carotid and 2 vagal paragangliomas. None of the patients had prior treatment and the minimum follow-up was 1 year. Surgery was performed in 28 (90%), primary irradiation in 1 (3%), and 2 (7%) refused treatment. We describe our results, the clinical course, diagnostic methods and treatment options.

A retrospective clinical study was made of 189 cases of thyroid cancer seen in our service between 1974 and 1994. Epidemiological, clinical, diagnostic, and therapeutic variables were analyzed for each histological type of thyroid carcinoma. Total thyroidectomy is the treatment of choice at our institution, followed by radioiodine treatment for differentiated carcinomas and external radiation and chemotherapy for anaplastic carcinomas. The 5-year survival rate after surgical treatment was 72% for all histological types of thyroid carcinoma. Permanent postoperative complications occurred in 2% of patients.