Current Thoracic Surgery

Background: The granulomatous reaction is a response that can occur in many infective, toxic, allergic, autoimmune, neoplastic, and etiologically unknown conditions. Hundreds of different agents that can cause this response. The most common granulomatous disease in Turkey and in developing countries is mycobacterial infection-related tuberculosis. This study was carried out to show the prevalence of patients operated in our clinic due to provisional diagnosis of lung cancer and diagnosed with granulomatous disease.

Materials and Methods: 380 patients who underwent diagnostic and therapeutic videothoracoscopy or thoracotomy due to provisional diagnosis of malignancy, and were diagnosed with granulomatous disease in consequence of histopathological examination between the years of 2011 and 2016 were included in the study. Patients were examined with regard to their clinical characteristics.

Results: Granulomatous disease was detected histopathologically in 28 (7.3%) of them. The final histopathological diagnosis was tuberculosis in 20 patients (71.4%), sarcoidosis in 3 patients (10.7%), infection in 2 patients (7.1%), rheumatoid nodule in 2 patients (7.1%), and allergic angiitis in one patient (3.5%).

Conclusions: In regions where tuberculosis is frequent, such as Turkey, granulomatous diseases should be considered in the differential diagnosis of lesions suspicious for malignancy.