Traumatic bone cysts in the jaws of a Hong Kong Chinese population.

The trabecular bone cyst (TBC) is the jaws' equivalent of the unicameral cyst of the long bones. A series of 20 TBCs were surgically treated in the jaws (19 in the mandible and one in the maxilla) of 14 Chinese patients (five males and nine females), who could broadly be divided into two age-sex groups; a young group of both sexes and an older, exclusively female group. Three patients in the older group had more than one TBC and the one with initially five separate TBCs (including one in the maxilla) exhibited six episodes of recurrence of the mandibular lesions which finally coalesced to affect the whole body of the mandible bilaterally.