Congenital granular cell epulis: a rare paediatric tumour of newborn

Congenital granular cell epulis is a congenital growth rarely found on the gingiva of neonates. These remarkably large tumours present in an infant’s mouth may impede with feeding, respiration or adequate mouth closure. Recognition of this entity and prompt treatment are essential for preventing any difficulties for the neonate. This is a case report of a 35-day-old female neonate who presented with a single exophytic lesion in the maxillary alveolar ridge. The differential diagnosis, management regimens and complications of this condition are reviewed. The lesion was excised under intravenous sedation and subjected to histopathological analysis. Based on the microscopic findings, the diagnosis of congenital granular cell epulis was confirmed. Clinicians including paediatricians, sonographers, dentists and surgical pathologists should be able to timely recognise and intervene such tumours as they may be potentially harmful to the infant.

A Rare Case of a Metastatic Malignant Abrikossoff Tumor

Abrikossoff tumor, also called granular cell tumor (GCT), is a neoplasm of the soft tissues which is most commonly a solitary, painless, and benign tumor. However, 2% of Abrikossoff tumors can be malignant. We report here the case of a 75-year-old male who presented a local recurrence of Abrikossoff tumor of the left thigh. The anatomopathological analysis concluded to a malignant GCT, and the F-18 fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography showed multiple lesions in the lymph nodes and bones. The potential conversion to malignancy should alert practitioners because of the extremely poor prognosis. The diagnosis of malignant granular cell tumor should be based on a bundle of clinical and histological features and not solely on histologic features because of the challenging distinction between malignant and benign tumors due to the lack of well-defined criteria for the diagnosis of malignancy. Large size and recurrence are the most important clinical features predicting malignant behavior. Patients with a history of Abrikossoff tumor should be followed closely to monitor recurrence and malignant transformation. The apparent originality of our observation – which could lie in the evolution of a GCT tumor, initially considered as benign, to a malignant form – has to be challenged regarding the issue of classifying some cases according to the classical “benign” and “malignant” dichotomy.

Congenital Granular Cell Tumour: Report of a case with review of literature and differential diagnosis.

Congenital Granular Cell Tumour (CGCT) is a rare benign lesion and presents in newborn as fibrous mass arising from the alveolus.The prenatal screening of lesion can help in parent counselling, determining the complications, as larger size lesion may interfere with normal delivery and require caesarean section.

Medullary Serotonergic Binding Deficits and Hippocampal Abnormalities in Sudden Infant Death Syndrome: One or Two Entities?

Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is understood as a syndrome that presents with the common phenotype of sudden death but involves heterogenous biological causes. Many pathological findings have been consistently reported in SIDS, notably in areas of the brain known to play a role in autonomic control and arousal. Our laboratory has reported abnormalities in SIDS cases in medullary serotonin (5-HT) receptor 1A and within the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus. Unknown, however, is whether the medullary and hippocampal abnormalities coexist in the same SIDS cases, supporting a biological relationship of one abnormality with the other. In this study, we begin with an analysis of medullary 5-HT1A binding, as determined by receptor ligand autoradiography, in a combined cohort of published and unpublished SIDS (n = 86) and control (n = 22) cases. We report 5-HT1A binding abnormalities consistent with previously reported data, including lower age-adjusted mean binding in SIDS and age vs. diagnosis interactions. Utilizing this combined cohort of cases, we identified 41 SIDS cases with overlapping medullary 5-HT1A binding data and hippocampal assessment and statistically addressed the relationship between abnormalities at each site. Within this SIDS analytic cohort, we defined abnormal (low) medullary 5-HT1A binding as within the lowest quartile of binding adjusted for age and we examined three specific hippocampal findings previously identified as significantly more prevalent in SIDS compared to controls (granular cell bilamination, clusters of immature cells in the subgranular layer, and single ectopic cells in the molecular layer of the dentate gyrus). Our data did not find a strong statistical relationship between low medullary 5-HT1A binding and the presence of any of the hippocampal abnormalities examined. It did, however, identify a subset of SIDS (~25%) with both low medullary 5-HT1A binding and hippocampal abnormalities. The subset of SIDS cases with both low medullary 5-HT1A binding and single ectopic cells in the molecular layer was associated with prenatal smoking (p = 0.02), suggesting a role for the exposure in development of the two abnormalities. Overall, our data present novel information on the relationship between neuropathogical abnormalities in SIDS and support the heterogenous nature and overall complexity of SIDS pathogenesis.

Neural Readout of a Latency Code in the Active Electrosensory System

The latency of spikes relative to a stimulus conveys sensory information across modalities. However, in most cases it remains unclear whether and how such latency codes are utilized by postsynaptic neurons. In the active electrosensory system of mormyrid fish, a latency code for stimulus amplitude in electroreceptor afferent nerve fibers (EAs) is hypothesized to be read out by a central reference provided by motor corollary discharge (CD). Here we demonstrate that CD enhances sensory responses in postsynaptic granular cells of the electrosensory lobe, but is not required for reading out EA input. Instead, diverse latency and spike count tuning across the EA population gives rise to graded information about stimulus amplitude that can be read out by standard integration of converging excitatory synaptic inputs. Inhibitory control over the temporal window of integration renders two granular cell subclasses differentially sensitive to information derived from relative spike latency versus spike count.