I lived with a painless neck lump for 15 years. I was diagnosed with cancer even though I had no symptoms

A man who had been living with a large lump in his neck for more than a decade finally tried to remove it but was given a surprise cancer diagnosis despite never having had any symptoms.

Around the age of 31, an anonymous Polish man noticed a small, firm, painless lump in the front of his neck.

He lived his life working in a military museum as a night watchman, but the lump continued to grow. After 15 years he noticed that the mass had grown so large that it interfered with his shaving.

Finally he went to the hospital of the Military Institute of Aviation Medicine in Warsaw.

There, doctors discovered that the man had a neck mass almost two inches in size, about the size of a postage stamp. They assumed it was a harmless growth called a thyroglossal duct cyst (TGDC), which usually forms in the uterus.

However, tests later showed that he was among just one percent of patients with this growth who had cancer cells in otherwise normal tissue. The patient was subsequently diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

Researchers at the Military Institute of Aviation Medicine are raising awareness about this rare condition. Given the unusual form of the cancer, doctors should pay attention to it, especially in their elderly patients.

TGDC is a relatively common neck abnormality and is found in 70 percent of children with neck lumps. As people age, they become less common and are estimated to affect only seven percent of Americans each year.

These form in the womb, when genetic abnormalities cause leftover thyroid tissue to form in cavities that fill with fluid.

There, TGDCs can go unnoticed for years.

Usually, a person finds out they have one when they notice a subtle swelling along the front of their neck, or have trouble swallowing or keeping their tongue in their mouth.

This is usually diagnosed in children before the age of 10 Cleveland Clinic.

Most patients experience no pain, and the vast majority of these are harmless, but in about one percent of cases they contain cancer cells that can spread.

In the Polish man’s situation, doctors say it is unusual for someone to live to be thirty years old and not realize that he or she has such growth.

That was the case with the anonymous 46-year-old man, whose story was published in the newspaper American Journal of Case Reports.

After doing the first scans, the doctors predicted that he had TGDC, but not cancer. But to prevent the lump from growing and making the man feel uncomfortable, they opted to surgically remove it. It is unclear when this happened.

The operation, they wrote, went smoothly. They were able to remove the entire tumor and the man only had to recover in the hospital for two days. However, routine cellular testing later discovered a cluster of cancer cells in the lump.

The arrow shows the lump in the throat of the 46-year-old patient. Doctors tried to cut it out before suspecting he had cancer

He was diagnosed with primary papillary thyroid cancer. Fortunately, doctors discovered it while it was still a stage 1 cancer, before it had gotten any bigger or spread to the patient’s bones, blood, or lymph nodes.

After running further tests to make sure the disease had not spread, doctors concluded that the patient’s cancer had already been cut out. Six months later he was still cancer-free.

In the rare cases where this type of neck lump is cancerous, surgery is the best form of treatment, the study authors said. This sometimes means that people also need to have part of their thyroid or neck bones removed.

In addition to surgery, people with this type of thyroid cancer, which affects about 44,000 Americans a year, may also benefit from hormone therapy, radiation or chemotherapy.

If this type of cancer is caught early, as in the case study, it is incredibly treatable. Between 99 and 100 percent of patients with the condition are declared cancer-free five years after diagnosis and treatment.

Although it is rare for these types of cysts to turn into cancerous tumors, the case study researchers advise doctors who find them in people over 40 to take special precautions to look for cancer.

They said: ‘The suspicion of malignancy should be higher in older patients with TGDC, due to the rarity of this condition in that age group.’