Lobular Capillary Haemangioma of the Oral Cavity in a 11-Year-Old Child - A Case Report

Abstract

Lobular capillary haemangiomas are benign vascular neoplasms that typically affect the skin or mucous membrane. Majority of the cases reporting lobular capillary haemangioma commonly involve the gingiva. There are rare cases presenting involvement of other parts of the oral cavity like buccal mucosa. The management of vascular lesions is more complex in children due to fear of uncontrollable bleeding. The case presented here reports a successful management of lobular capillary haemangioma of the buccal mucosa in an 11 - year - old child. Vascular lesions are one of the rare disorders affecting the overall quality of life of a child. American Academy of Paediatric Dentistry (AAPD) has presented numerous lesions, masses, or tumour-like conditions of hard and soft tissues within the oral and maxillofacial regions of children and young adults; most of these lesions being mucosal conditions. Oral vascular tumours encompass a wide spectrum of anomalies in children. In spite of the fact that a few cases are congenital, most of them arise during childhood.1 The vascular lesions of childhood are classified into two categories: haemangiomas (proliferating or involuting) and vascular malformations. Haemangioma is a term that envelops a heterogeneous gathering of clinical benign vascular lesions that share similar histologic features and presents as a proliferating mass of blood vessels. Haemangiomas are classified on the basis of their histological1 appearance as capillary, mixed or cavernous haemangiomas depending on the size of the vascular spaces or a sclerosing variety that tends to undergo fibrosis. Capillary haemangiomas are of two types; lobular capillary haemangioma and non-lobular capillary haemangioma depending on their histological features. Lobular capillary haemangioma (LCH) is a common reactive angiomatous proliferation of skin and mucous membranes.2,3 LCH (Mills et al. 1980 ) represents an essential, underlying lesion of pyogenic granuloma (PG).4,5 Based on the available literature and case reports, several clinical and histological differences were seen between PG and LCH, yet there is no clear distinction between the two and still remains a topic of debate. The peak prevalence of LCH is in paediatric population and young adults, with a female predilection. Although LCH is one of the most common soft tissue tumours of head and neck accounting for almost 6 % of all cases, there is a striking predilection for lesions on the gingiva. The occurrence of intraoral haemangiomas at sites such as lips, tongue, buccal mucosa, and palate are extremely rare. LCH is a tumour-like growth of the oral cavity or skin that is considered to be non-neoplastic in nature. The purpose of this paper is to report a case of lobular capillary haemangioma in a paediatric patient and describe the successful treatment of this case.