What is a cystic-appearing lesion?

Factual Questions
1

I’m looking for an interpretation of medical terminology, not medical advice. If I need advice I’ll post in MPSIMS.

About three weeks ago I started to experience pain in my right shoulder when I would lift my arm over my head or in front of my face. It was also painful to try to do a push-up or push myself up from a lying down position with my right arm. I already had a routine doctor’s appointment coming up so I just avoided doing things that were painful and waited to see the doctor.

He took an x-ray and the office just called to tell me I had a “2.4 cm cystic appearing lesion” in my shoulder. Or maybe a 2.4 cm cystic apparent elision, which is what I wrote down, but only the former appears in any google searches.

Can someone put that in layman’s terms? They said the next step is to get an MRI to get a better look at it.

2

IANAD but you know what a cyst is:

“A cyst is a closed sac, having a distinct membrane and division compared to the nearby tissue. It may contain air, fluids, or semi-solid material.”

A lesion is:

"A lesion is any abnormality in the tissue of an organism (in layman’s terms, “damage”), usually caused by disease or trauma. "

So you’ve got a lump that’s not supposed to be there, and it doesn’t seem to be an abcess (“A collection of pus is called an abscess, not a cyst.”). It appears to be a cyst.

The doctor wants more info, maybe about how it got there and to figure out how to get rid of it, but for now that’s the diagnosis.

3

Thanks - I guess I was searching for “cystic lesion” and didn’t think to look at the terms separately. Doesn’t tell me much but I guess that’s what the MRI is for.

4

My son had one of this on his knee. It went away, or at least became unnoticeable on it’s own without treatment, but it was much smaller than 2.5cm.

5

There are true cysts (which implies some sort of epithelial lining, which may or may not make fluid or gunk to fill the space).

Then there are spaces in tissue which resemble cysts on imaging, but can be due to localized tissue breakdown, buildup of fluid etc.

Less commonly there are cystic tumors (benign or malignant).

Imaging won’t necessarily be able to distinguish between all these possibilities, which is why wording like “cystic-appearing lesion” shows up in radiology reports.

6

A cyst can have air in it?

7

According to the medical journal Wikipedia, yes! :slight_smile: (but, surely anything that isn’t solid has air in it right?)