Central angioleiomyoma of the mandible: A rare entity

Abstract

The leiomyoma is a benign smooth-muscle neoplasm commonly found in the female genital tract, gastrointestinal tract, or skin. Leiomyomas of the oral cavity are unusual. Oral leiomyomas are uncommon due to the paucity of the smooth muscle in the mouth (except in blood vessels) and thus the involvement of jaw bones is extremely rare. Leiomyomas have been classified as solid angiomyoma, angioleiomyoma (vascular leiomyoma), and epithelioid variants. Angioleiomyomas are benign mesenchymal tumors derived from smooth muscle, which rarely occur in the oral cavity. Malignant transformation probably does not occur but careful histopathologic examination is still necessary to differentiate these benign lesions from their malignant counterparts due to different prognosis. Although uncommon in the maxilla and mandible, they should be included in the differential diagnosis of radiolucent lesions of jaw bones. An extensive search of literature was carried out on the Medline-PubMed and Google Scholar database using the keywords such as leiomyoma, angioleiomyoma, jaw bones, maxilla, mandible, intra-osseous to thoroughly search and collect all the reported cases of intraosseous leiomyoma (but our search was not limited to these terms only). To the best of our knowledge, only 23 cases of intraosseous leiomyomas have been reported so far in the jaw bones, among which only 8 belonged to angioleiomyomas. Herein, we report the 9^th case of intraosseous angioleiomyoma, one of the variants of leiomyoma and overall 24^th intraosseous leiomyoma in a 6-year-old female child, together with conventional histopathologic and immunohistochemical findings.

Keywords: Angioleiomyoma; benign; intraoral; leiomyoma; smooth muscle; solid variant.