A middle-aged man sought care for recurring pain in his right flank, and a CT scan turned up two problems. One was expected: several stones in his right kidney, with mild swelling from blocked urine flow. The other was a well-defined nodule in the region of his right adrenal gland that, judging by its density, looked like a solid tumor.
When surgeons operated, the adrenal gland looked normal. The mass sitting nearby was a bronchogenic cyst, a benign cyst whose wall contained the kind of tissue that normally lines the airways, found far below the chest. Urologists at Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine in Xichang, Sichuan, reported the case on September 10, 2026, in the American Journal of Case Reports.
