Cerebral metastasis of malignant cardiac myxoma.

A rare case of bona fide cerebral metastasis of malignant cardiac myxoma is presented. The parenchymal brain tumor of a 32-year-old woman with a history of surgical operations on cardiac myxoma and jejunal leiomyosarcoma was surgically extirpated. The initial pathological diagnosis was metastatic sarcoma. Ten months later, an occlusion of bilateral carotid arteries occurred that was due to tumor emboli. The postmortem examination revealed an unusually rapid recurrence of the cardiac tumor containing sarcomatous components that were histologically identical to the tumors of the brain and the jejunum and the emboli of the cerebral vessels. Hence it was deduced that they all originated in the primary malignant cardiac myxoma.