• Hideharu Tanaka, Norihisa Uemura, Tetsuya Abe, Eiji Higaki, Jiro Kawakami, Takahiro Hosoi, Byonggu An, Koji Komori, Seiji Ito, and Yasuhiro Shimizu.
• Department of Gastroenterological Surgery, Aichi Cancer Center Hospital, 1-1 Kanokoden, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, Aichi, 464-8681, Japan. h-tanaka@aichi-cc.jp.
• Gen Thorac Cardiovasc Surg. 2018 Feb 1; 66 (2): 116-119.

AbstractTracheal diverticulum, a benign entity characterized by single or multiple invaginations of the tracheal wall, is commonly asymptomatic and detected incidentally. We report the case of a 76-year-old man with a tracheal diverticulum who underwent thoracoscopic esophagectomy with a three-field lymphadenectomy for middle thoracic esophageal cancer. The tracheal diverticulum was located at the right posterolateral region of the trachea, which overlapped the region of dissection of the right recurrent laryngeal nerve lymph nodes. Paratracheal lymph node dissection is an important surgical procedure for thoracic esophageal cancer. In such cases, there is a risk of misidentifying a tracheal diverticulum as an enlarged lymph node and injuring it. Injury of a tracheal diverticulum causes serious complications such as mediastinal emphysema, mediastinitis, and pulmonary fistula. It is important to recognize its existence preoperatively and perform accurate lymph node dissection by taking full advantage of the magnified visual effect provided by thoracoscopic surgery.

29 keywords...

hide…