Nonsyndromic Accessory Tongue in a Patient with Cleft Palate: A Rare Case Report

Abstract

ABSTRACT An accessory tongue is a rare congenital anomaly. It occurs asisolated events or as a part of clinical syndromes. Co-existenceof tongue anomalies with cleft palate have been previouslyreported as isolated findings in nonsyndromic cases and alsoas co-existing anomalies in syndromic cases. Only a few casesof double/accessory tongue have been cited in the literature.We report a 22-year-old female patient presenting with non-syndromic accessory tongue associated with cleft palate. Keywords: Congenital malformations, Double tongue,Accessory tongue, Cleft palate. How to cite this article: Vasudevan V, Chavva P, Devaiah D,Venkatappa M, Shrihari TG, Viswanath D. NonsyndromicAccessory Tongue in a Patient with Cleft Palate: A Rare CaseReport. J Indian Aca Oral Med Radiol 2013;25(3):00-00. Source of support: Nil Conflict of interest: None INTRODUCTION The tongue is the most important structure in the oral cavity.Its main functions are speech, taste and deglutition.Congenital malformations of the tongue are rare andaccessory tongue is extremely uncommon and difficult toestimate in terms of incidence. The development of thetongue starts at around the 4th week of the intra uterine lifeby the appearance of the two lateral lingual swellings, whichare the medial most parts of the mandibular arches and thetuberculum impar. The fusion between these developmentalprojections results in the formation of anterior 2/3rds of thetongue. A defect in the fusion of the two lateral lingualswellings leads to accessory tongue. The accessory tonguewill interfere with the approximation of the palatal shelvesin the midline if the tongue or any ectopic mass on the tonguefails to descent to its anatomic position resulting in cleftpalate which develops from the 7th-12th embryonal weeks.