This week's artwork was donated by Jaclyn, a pediatric cancer patient who received treatment at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia . Primary treatment is usually surgical removal with en bloc resection for invasive tumors. Thymomas rarely metastasize outside of the chest.
Preoperative radiation appears to offer no major survival advantage.
Recurrences may be surgically resected in some situations. Postoperative adjuvant radiation therapy is recommended for those patients with the invasive form of thymoma. A histologic classification has been proposed that has been shown to correlate with prognosis. Most studies show that medullary histology is associated with a better prognosis than cortical or mixed histology. Although survival data from historical series showed that the presence of myasthenia gravis was an adverse prognostic factor, other series find that it no longer confers a worse prognosis.