Vanishing bone syndrome or Gorham's disease or osteo-vascular dysplasia is a very rare bone anomaly.
The syndrome is so rare and poorly understood that its causes and conditions of occurrence are still not known exactly.
The syndrome was first scientifically described in 1954, but descriptions of a disease similar to it were found in past centuries.
At the moment, all that is known about the syndrome is that this disease is congenital and that it manifests itself in the fact that the bone tissue is gradually but inevitably destroyed, and in its place a plexus of thin blood vessels appears.
In March 2018, the medical journal "BMJ Case Reports" published a unique material from the doctors of the Royal Hospital of Edinburgh - the story of the observation of the development of disappearing bone syndrome in an unnamed 44-year-old woman from Scotland.
It all started with the fact that the woman began to torment the increasing pain in her left forearm. Then it became difficult for her to move this hand. When she went to the hospital, she was initially suspected of having cancer, but two subsequent biopsies showed nothing.
Only the third biopsy revealed an anomaly, and it turned out to be proliferation of blood vessels in the area of the forearm bone.
Over the next months, the woman's pain increased, her arm was swollen, vascular tissue grew and at the same time bone tissue was destroyed. And only 18 months later, when the bone was almost invisible on x-rays, doctors realized that they were dealing with a syndrome of disappearing bone.
Promotional video:
The X-ray images below clearly show how the patient's forearm bone gradually disappeared. In the last picture, the bone is no longer visible and an overgrown network of thin blood vessels has taken its place.
Since 1954, only 64 cases of disappearing bone syndrome have been recorded in the history of medicine, and most of them affected the bones of the hands. Even more rare abnormalities can be found online when the syndrome affected the bones of the skull, including the lower jaw.
Due to its extreme rarity, there is no single treatment for this syndrome. Surgeons can only remove part of the affected bone, or try to transplant a piece of healthy bone tissue onto the affected area of the bone with the hope that it will grow.
You can also use radiation therapy, but nothing is known about its success.
This is a rather frightening syndrome, but the good news is that at least it is not cancerous and if the disease affects a specific bone, it will not spread to other bones in the skeleton.
