A case of progressive hemifacial atrophy (PHA) with extensive atrophy of the walls of the maxillary sinus is reported. Prolapse of subcutaneous tissue and orbital fat through the bony defect simulated the presence of a tumour and led to surgical exploration. Such a severe degree of bony involvement with relatively mild soft tissue atrophy is exceptional. Radiological evaluation by hypocycloidal tomography contributed greatly to the diagnosis in this case.

Unilateral progressive atrophy of the face was first described by Parry (1825) and by Romberg (1846). Eulenberg (1871) coined the name ‘progressive facial hemiatrophy’, but ‘progressive hemifacial atrophy’ (PHA) is a more appropriate term (Gorlin and Pindborg, 1964; Kabir and Halprin, 1964). The disease commences usually in the first or second decade of life, and is more common in females. Over several years there is a slowly progressive atrophy of the face on one side, with involvement of the skin and subcutaneous fat, and on rare occasions also of the muscles and bones (Gorlin and Pindborg, 1964; Finesilver and Rosow, 1938; Bramley and Forbes, 1960; Singh and Bajpai, 1969; Crikelair et al., 1962). The etiology of the disease is unknown.

We report an unusual case in which the hemifacial atrophy affected the bone much more than the soft tissues and which presented as a mass in the maxillary sinus.

Masking in psychoacoustic experiments means that the perception of one acoustic stimulus, the signal, is over-ruled by the introduction of another acoustic stimulus, the masker. Signal and masker will compete with each other in a predictable way, as noted by Wegel and Lane (1924), and by Zwicker and Feldtkeller (1967), among others.

The interaction of signal and masker is described by masking curves, which can be thought of as a contour-line of the neural elements involved in processing signal and masker. Thus the masking curves reveal some of the parameters of the signal. Therefore masking experiments can be used to analyse signals otherwise not easily investigated. This was my purpose in studying the masking of tinnitus.

Three main features turned out to be of special interest:

1. the influence of frequency, spectrum and intensity, both of the tinnitus and of the masking stimuli;

2. the temporal pattern of the masking process;

3. binaural masking effects.

The light microscopic and ultrastructural features of a laryngeal salivary duct carcinoma are presented. By light microscopy, the neoplasm bore a marked resemblance to the infiltrating duct carcinoma of the breast. Ultrastructurally, the tumour was characterized by the presence of two principal types of cells, i.e. epithelial and myoepithelial cells, arranged in duct-formation.

Leiomyomas or benign tumours of smooth muscle origin are extremely rare in the nose, due to the paucity of significant masses of smooth muscle in this region. A review of the literature revealed only six cases of leiomyoma (Fu and Perzin, 1975; Kambayashi, 1978; MacCaffrey et al., 1978; Maesaka et al., 1966; Kotaka and Furuya, 1973) previously reported and no case of nasal leiomyoblastoma. This variety of benign smooth muscle tumour has been mostly described in the gastrointestinal tract and uterus (Stout, 1962). In this paper we report a case of an unusual nasal leiomyoma arising from the middle turbinate. We believe it is the first in the literature.