A rare presentation of a rare disease: endobronchial hamartoma with lobar bronchiectasis

Abstract

Benign lung tumors are very rare, endobronchial hamartomas -one of which- are even more rare. Endobronchial masses tend to represent themselves via obstruction related symptoms and endobronchial hamartomas are not an exception. It is important to diagnose endobronchial masses before they bring untreatable damage to the lung. It is also important to differentiate endobronchial hamartomas from endobronchial malignancies, such as carcinomas, for they also tend to act mildly symptomatic for a long period of time. In our case, the patient was admitted to our clinic with the symptoms of cough and mild hemoptysis. A computed chest tomography showed total bronchiectasis of right upper lobe along with an endobronchial mass in the right upper lobe bronchus. Bronchoscopic biopsy of the mass revealed no diagnosis. We performed a right upper lobectomy and the pathological examination resulted as endobronchial hamartoma. There are numerous cases about endobronchial hamartomas in the literature which represented with countless symptoms and diseases as persistent cough, recurrent pneumonia, local bronchiectasis and so forth. Our case of endobronchial hamartoma representing with total bronchiectasis of a whole lobe of the lung is the first and only case in the English literature to our knowledge.