Medical Must-See: The dumbbell that wasn’t a schwannoma
A spinal tumour that looked like a textbook schwannoma was something far rarer (and trickier to pronounce).
When radiologists describe a dumbbell-shaped mass hugging the spine, what springs to mind?
If you were to say a benign nerve sheath tumour, such as a schwannoma, you’d be close.
But in this tricky case, the dumbbell was a desmoid.
It began with a routine work-related screening chest X-ray that showed the patient, aged 24, had an unexpected left posterior mediastinal mass.
