Anaplastic Thyroid Carcinoma Mimicking Cervical Tuberculosis: A Case Report

Introduction:Cancer and tuberculosis are two common diseases that affect health worldwide. They affect various organs and typically present with different clinical manifestations. However, these two diseases can sometimes present with unusual but similar clinical manifestations, leading to misdiagnosis of cancer and tuberculosis [1]. The thyroid gland is not spared from this risk of diagnostic error. It is more common for thyroid tuberculosis to be misdiagnosed as thyroid cancer than the opposite [2,3] In fact, Thyroid tuberculosis is a great mimicker and diagnostic chameleon and is prone to be diagnostic as thyroid carcinoma [2,3]. However, it is very rare for thyroid cancer to present as cervical tuberculosis. To our knowledge, only three cases of thyroid carcinoma initially manifesting as a neck abscess have been reported [4,5,6]. In this report, we describe a very rare case of an adult who presented with symptoms resembling cervical tuberculosis and pathological results ultimately revealed anaplastic thyroid carcinoma.