When a CT scan shows a lump on an adrenal gland, doctors usually try to answer two questions before deciding whether to operate: Is it making hormones, and does it look dangerous? For a 51-year-old man in southwestern China, neither blood tests nor imaging gave a clear answer. Surgery did.
Once surgeons took it out, the suspected adrenal tumor turned out to be a bronchogenic cyst. These are sacs of airway tissue that normally form in the chest, and finding one below the diaphragm is extremely rare. The authors counted only 121 such retroperitoneal cases in the English-language medical literature.
