Loading
4 slides generated from the cancer page, with a quiz from the open benchmark and speaker notes that cite the sources. Arrow keys move between slides; Print gives one slide per page.
Pulmonary blastoma is a very rare lung cancer of adults that mixes a fetal-looking gland component with a primitive sarcoma-like component, and so belongs with the sarcomatoid lung cancers. It is different from the pleuropulmonary blastoma of young children. Surgery is the treatment; chemotherapy has no proven benefit and the outlook is poor.
The WHO classification places classic biphasic pulmonary blastoma among the sarcomatoid carcinomas: a tumour with fetal-type adenocarcinoma glands and a primitive blastematous stroma, distinct from the pure fetal adenocarcinoma (formerly well-differentiated fetal adenocarcinoma) that sits with adenocarcinoma variants, and from pleuropulmonary blastoma, a childhood DICER1-related tumour with its own page (Nicholson 2022). Pulmonary blastomas make up 0.25 to 0.5 percent of malignant lung neoplasms; most patients are adults with an average age of 43, tobacco use is a causative factor, 40 percent are asymptomatic and the usual finding is a large peripheral nodule (Lung Cancer 2011). Somatic DICER1 mutations have been reported in adult-onset pulmonary blastoma, linking it biologically to the childhood tumour (European Respiratory Journal 2016).
How it differs from its parent: it is the only non-small-cell lung cancer with embryonic-type tissue, its patients are two decades younger than the lung cancer average, and it is not treated with the parent's driver or immunotherapy pathways because no evidence exists for them.
| Setting | Approach | Guideline |
|---|---|---|
| All stages | Surgical excision; adjuvant chemotherapy and radiotherapy of unproven benefit; no trial exists. | not mapped |