A woman's upper jaw had swollen on both sides, and one of the lesions had broken through the bone's outer shell. Under the microscope, the tissue was crowded with giant cells, the kind pathologists see in several destructive jaw growths. Yet surgeons never operated on her face. The problem that mattered was a single overactive gland in her neck.
Her case is one of three described by oral surgeons at Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco, in a retrospective case series published online July 29 in the International Journal of Surgery Case Reports and included in the journal's September issue. All three women, ages 22 to 60, were treated between 2022 and 2023 for painless, expanding jaw lesions that turned out to be brown tumors, a bone complication of long-term excess parathyroid hormone. In each case, the jaw swelling was the first sign of a hormone disorder no one had yet diagnosed.
