Gout is supposed to announce itself in a big toe, an ankle, or a knee. It is not supposed to form a mass in the middle of the chest.
Yet that is what a Mayo Clinic team in Rochester, Minnesota, documented in a patient whose anterior mediastinal mass, located in the front of the chest behind the breastbone, took up tracer on a PET/CT scan in a way that mimicked a malignant tumor. The final diagnosis was tophaceous gout, a form of the disease in which uric acid crystals build up into solid deposits.
