Benign bone-forming lesions: osteoma, osteoid osteoma, and osteoblastoma

Abstract

The benign bone lesions--osteoma, osteoid osteoma, and osteoblastoma--are characterized as bone-forming because tumor cells produce osteoid or mature bone. Osteoma is a slow-growing lesion most commonly seen in the paranasal sinuses and in the calvaria. When it occurs in the long bones, it is invariably juxtacortical and may need to be differentiated from, among others, parosteal osteosarcoma, sessile osteochondroma, and a matured juxtacortical focus of myositis ossificans. Osteoid osteoma and osteoblastoma appear histologically very similar. Their clinical presentations and distribution in the skeleton, however, are distinct: osteoid osteoma is usually accompanied by nocturnal pain promptly relieved by salicylates; osteoblastoma arises predominantly in the axial skeleton, spinal lesions constituting one-third of reported cases. This review focuses on the application of the various imaging modalities in the diagnosis, differential diagnosis, and evaluation of these lesions. Their histopathology also is discussed, and their treatment briefly outlined.

The evolution of manus shape in sauropod dinosaurs: implications for functional morphology, forelimb orientation, and phylogeny

“…The singular occurrence and the regular shape imply that it represents a bone tumour. Plausible diagnoses are an osteoma or an osteoblastoma, both of them representing benign bone-forming lesions (Greenspan 1993). …”

Mass in the Forehead of a Three-Year-Old Girl

“…An osteoblastoma is by definition greater than 1.5 cm in diameter [15]. The smaller, histologically similar osteoid osteoma is usually less than 1 cm in diameter, classically presents with severe throbbing nocturnal pain relieved by aspirin and involves the skull very infrequently [16]. The present child is unlikely to have an osteoblastoma because of her young age, the rapid progression of her symptoms and the atypical radiographic finding.…”

The indication for gamma probe-guided surgery of spinal osteoid osteomas

“…They mainly affect long bones of children and of young adults and occur in the spine with a frequency of about 10% [11]. Traditional therapy of spinal lesions consists of open intralesional resection but recent papers report the use of CT-guided radiofrequency ablation (RFA) [6,7,12,14,18,21,23].…”