Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-2021

Identifier

Bookshelf ID: NBK564302

Abstract

Excerpt

Thymectomy is the resection of the thymus gland. This anterior mediastinal organ can enlarge as in myasthenia gravis and thymoma and harbor malignant cells such as in thymic carcinoma or neuroendocrine tumors. The first thymectomies were performed incidentally in conjunction with thyroidectomies for Grave disease by Garre and Sauerbruch, but it was not until Blalock and colleagues that multiple series were performed with adequate results.

This also included patients with myasthenia gravis but without thymomas. The gold standard approach for thymectomy is a median sternotomy or transsternal approach, but this has evolved to less invasive techniques such as upper partial sternotomy, transcervical, video-assisted thoracoscopic thymectomy, and robot-assisted approaches. Preoperative evaluation should include the functional status and pulmonary function tests, especially with single-lung ventilation in thoracoscopic approaches. Video-assisted and robot-assisted thoracoscopic thymectomies have shown to be superior to the traditional open approaches (transsternal or transcervical) in promoting shorter hospital length of stay and decreased morbidity and mortality.

Journal Title

StatPearls

Comments

Last updated Jan. 2021

This book is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, duplication, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, a link is provided to the Creative Commons license, and any changes made are indicated.

NCBI Bookshelf: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK564302/

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