I've probably viewed 100,000+ chest xrays and CT scans in my life, but I've never before encountered this anomaly. You learn something every day.
Embedded images from the New England Journal of Medicine. A concise summary of the radiographic features, associated clinical syndromes, and ddx is available at Radiopaedia.
That sure looks like it would hurt. Is that an injury? or congenital?
ReplyDeleteThe parts of the text that show up in different colors are called "links." Try using your mouse thingy to click on the second one.
DeleteEdison is definitely out of my wheelhouse and as I feared it was a little rough going for me. It looks as though, and please let me know if I'm wrong, that it is a congenital problem and that, at least mostly, it doesn't hurt.
ReplyDeleteIt is, in fact, a congenital disorder caused by incomplete development of the vertebra and is typically an incidental finding, but sometimes results in back pain similar to arthritis.
DeleteAre you a radiologist? I've been following you for about 15 years, comment every 5 years, and even after all this time I didn't know you were a fellow rad.
ReplyDeletePulmonologist. Got my initial chest radiology training from Jack Reynolds and Ed Christiansen at Dallas in the 1970s. Still have a stack of teaching xrays that I had duplicated for me from my best cases in the 70s and 80s at Dallas and Kentucky, but they have never been digitized, so not easy to share.
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