gms | German Medical Science

Primary malignant lymphomas of the salivary glands are relatively rare. Clinical manifestation is not uniform and the disease initially often remains unrecognized. Lymphoma appears as “a surprise” for the surgeon, which leads to unnecessarily extensive surgery with all accompanying risks.

Aim: To stress the importance of clinical thinking towards malignant lymphoma of the parotid and review the data from history, presentation and radiological investigations, which may direct us to the diagnosis.

Results and discussion: We present a case of a 54 years old female with Parotid NHL, diagnosed after surgery and controlled successfully with radiation and chemotherapy. Suggestive factors, typical CT symptoms and options for histologic sampling are discussed.

Conclusions: Primary parotid NHL is a disease with good prognosis and high local tumor control. If it is considered, unnecessarily extensive surgery can often be avoided. Parotidectomy is indicated only in cases when fine needle aspiration biopsy is impossible, no other tumor tissue is accessible for sampling and the results from FNA or frozen sections are unreliable. The role of surgery is purely diagnostic. The proved NHL is treated exclusively conservatively.

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