ENT severe complications of infectious mononucleosis in healthy adolescents: Report of two cases and literature review
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Keywords
deep neck abscess, spontaneous tonsillar hemorrhage, infectious mononucleosis, adolescent, immunocompetent
Abstract
Infectious mononucleosis (MI) is a generally benign and self-limited condition in childhood and adolescence due to the primary EBV infection characterized by the triad of pharyngitis, fever, and lymphadenopathies. The risk of complications increases with age and immuno- suppression. The most frequent fatal complications are those associated with splenic ruptu- re, neurological alterations, and airway obstruction due to increased tonsillar size. Cervical abscesses associated with MI are rare, being mostly peritonsillar and intra-tonsil. We pre- sent two surgical cases of big deep cervical abscesses with retropharyngeal and paraphary- ngeal involvement in healthy very young adolescents (14 and 15 years old), without any type of immunosuppression or risk factors, one of them associated with a clinically relevant spontaneous tonsillar bleeding, which had not been described in the literature associated with MI in such young patient.
