Thoracic Intraspinal Synovial Cyst Causing Myelopathy: A Case Report (original) (raw)

Intraspinal synovial cysts are found within the lumbar spine and less commonly found in the cervical spine (1). An occurrence of a cyst in the thoracic spine causing myelopathy is extremely rare (2) and to the best of our knowledge, 25 cases of thoracic synovial cyst have been reported in the English language clinical literature and of these cases, only seven cases have been reported where a synovial cyst was combined with myelopathy. These intraspinal extradural cysts arise from the facet capsules of degenerative facet joints and are designated as synovial (1, 2), juxtafacet (3), ganglion (4), or ligamentum flavum cysts (5). We report the radiological findings of a case of thoracic intraspinal synovial cyst that caused myelopathy at the T2-3 level.