Tuberculosis of the spleen with pleural effusion: a rare but important clinical entity.

Abstract

Among cases of extra-pulmonary tuberculosis, splenic tuberculosis is exceptionally rare, poorly described in the available literature, and more usually encountered in miliary tuberculosis than as an isolated presenting feature (Bastounis et al., 1999). Only 16 (0.01%) of the 9205 cases of tuberculosis recently investigated by Dixit et al. (2010), in the Indian state of Rajasthan, had splenic tuberculosis. In autopsy-based studies, tubercular splenic abscesses have only been found in 0.14%– 0.7% of tuberculosis cases (Jain et al., 2008). An Indian patient with such an abscess is described below.