Incidental Tumor: Incidentaloma?

As part of my present job, I get to encounter a lot of ‘unusual’ diagnoses that I haven’t heard of or probably missed out in med school. I have previously posted on myokimia and abdominal epilepsy. Here’s another one that I thought was a joke at first, but upon checking, realized that it’s really an accepted medical diagnosis.

Incidentaloma is a tumor (-oma) found by coincidence (incidental) without clinical symptoms or suspicion. It is a common problem: up to 7% of all patients over 60 may harbor a benign growth, often of the adrenal gland, which is detected when diagnostic imaging is used for the analysis of unrelated symptoms. With the increase of "whole-body CT scans" as part of health screening programs, the chance of finding incidentalomas is expected to increase. 37% of patients receiving whole-body CT scan may have abnormal findings that need further evaluation.

When faced with an unexpected finding on diagnostic imaging, the clinician faces the challenge to prove that the lesion is indeed harmless. Often, some other tests are required to determine the exact nature of an incidentaloma.

Examples are adrenal incidentaloma, renal, pituitary, pulmonary, thyroid and parathyroid incidentalomas, and liver incidentalomas.

The concept of the incidentaloma has been criticized; as such lesions do not have much in common other than the history of an incidental identification and the assumption that they are clinically inert. It has been proposed just to say that such lesions have been "incidentally found." The underlying pathology shows no unifying histological concept.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidentaloma