Abstract
This review presents a comprehensive and updated overview of bigerminal choristomas (hairy polyps) of naso-oropharynx/oral cavity, and discusses the controversies related to nosology and origin from a clinico-embryologic perspective. English-language texts of the last 25 years (January 1989-January 2014) were collected from the PubMed/MEDLINE database using the given keywords. Of the 330 records, 64 full-text articles (mostly case reports/series) were selected, incorporating clinical data from 78 patients, after screening through duplicates and the given exclusion criteria. With the available evidence, hairy polyps appear more common than generally believed, and are increasingly being recognized as an important, often-missed cause of respiratory distress and feeding difficulty in neonates and infants. Such a child without any apparent cause should be examined with flexible nasopharyngoscope to specifically look for hairy polyps which might be life-threatening, especially when small. The female preponderance as believed today has been found to be an overestimation in this review. These lesions are characteristically composed of mature ectodermal and mesodermal tissue derivatives presenting as heterotopic masses, hence termed choristoma. However, little is known about their origin, and whether they are developmental malformations or primitive teratomas is debatable. Involvement of Eustachian tube and tonsils as predominant subsites and the speculated molecular embryogenesis link hairy polyps to the development of the first and second pharyngeal arches. They are exceptionally rare in adults, but form a distinct entity in this age-group and could be explained as delayed pluripotent cell morphogenesis or focal neoplastic malformations, keeping with the present-day understandings of the expanded "teratoma family".
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