Effectiveness of fine-needle aspiration cytology in the diagnosis of lateral cervical nonthyroid tumors

Abstract

Given that the clinical and radiological examinations of lateral cervical masses are not always sufficient for deciding on appropriate management, the cytological examination of the material obtained by fine-needle aspiration might be an efficient tool in the preoperative investigation of these lesions.In this prospective cross-sectional study we evaluated the efficacy and diagnostic accuracy of fine-needle aspiration cytology in the assessment of lateral cervical nonthyroid tumors, by comparing its results with those of histopathology.A total of 58 patients with lateral cervical masses were included. Preoperative cytological results were compared with the histopathologic examination of surgical specimens.Both cytology and histology indicated that malignant tumors outnumbered benign lesions (62% vs 38%), with 88.9% of malignancies presenting in patients aged >50 years, but cytology was less effective at differentiating between benign and nontumor lesions. Cytology had 76.5% specificity and 78.1% sensitivity for identifying malignant lateral cervical lesions, and there was a concordance between the two diagnostic tests (McNemar test, P = 0.17, κ = 0.50, P <0.001).Fine-needle aspiration cytology is a simple, quick, and effective procedure that can aid in the preoperative evaluation of lateral cervical masses by differentiating benign tumors and inflammatory processes from malignancies and thus help in determining a subsequent therapeutic strategy.

Colposcopic, Histologic and Immunohistochemical Assessment in Cervical Intraepithelial Lesions

“…The pathological specimen assessment certainly offers important elements for dignosis, but IHC techniques provide additional information on prognosis, or might be adapted and considered retrospectively to examine tissues, thus allowing a more accurate diagnosis [32,33].…”

Accuracy of fine‐needle aspiration cytology of head and neck masses

“…Many structures such as lymph nodes, salivary glands and thyroid are easily accessible and provide a specific set of lesions with possible differential diagnoses . FNAC is broadly adopted as a longstanding tool for the diagnosis and the planning of an effective treatment of head and neck masses . Nevertheless, its sensitivity and specificity reporting in the literature are widely variable and mainly depend on the site of the mass .…”

“…1 FNAC is broadly adopted as a longstanding tool for the diagnosis and the planning of an effective treatment of head and neck masses. 2 Nevertheless, its sensitivity and specificity reporting in the literature are widely variable and mainly depend on the site of the mass. 3 Besides, some diagnoses remain cytologically challenging because of the rarity of some lesions as for salivary gland pathology.…”

Benefits of respiratory navigation aided MRI in case of large abdominal tumors of canines: A case study

“…As this method based on cytomorphological aspect of cells and tissue particles acquired using a fine needle, a mass that has only a narrow rim of cells can give a poor sample. One more reason, which explains the different results gained by cytology and histology, could be the fact that fine‐needle aspiration is often more reliable to predict the malignicity of the tumor and then to define its exact type due to its low sensitivity to characterize . Contrary to cytology, for the histopathological examination, the whole tumor was available that made possible to determine its type.…”