A healthy man with intractable hiccups.

We present a patient with intractable hiccups. Medical treatment decreased the frequency of the hiccups to only 5-10 per minute. After exclusion of gastrointestinal reasons for the hiccups, cranial MRI revealed a small lesion in the right rhomboid fossa, close to the vagal trigone. Microsurgical resection of the lesion was performed via a suboccipital median craniotomy. The histopathological diagnosis was a cavernoma. Promptly after surgery the patient was free of symptoms. Intractable hiccups can be associated with intracranial pathologies, including lesions in the brain stem, which we highlight with the presentation of this patient. Copyright 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.