Structural differences between alcoholic and diabetic parotid sialosis.

UNLABELLED Between the sialosis' etiologic agents, we can find the chronic alcoholism and diabetes. Both nosologic entities are described using a similar histopathologic pattern. OBJECTIVES The purpose of this work has been analyzing and comparing the histopathological differences between the diabetic and alcoholic sialosis. STUDY DESIGN We studied 7 parotid glands samples of diabetic patients and 4 samples of normal glands obtained from surgical material were used as a control. For the comparative study, we used 12 parotid glands from chronic alcoholic patients with clinical diagnosis of cirrhosis and 6 autopsies on individuals who had died from alcoholic hepatic cirrhosis. This material was fixed in formaline, processed for embedding in paraffin, standard coloration techniques and immunotechnique for cytokeratin EA/1 y EA/3. RESULTS In the cases of diabetics, the parotid gland was characterised by the presence of small acini, a bigger number of lipid intracytoplasmic droplets in the acinar and ductal cells, as well as an abundant adipose infiltration in the stroma when compared to the alcoholics. We observed that the cytokeratins' expression was heterogeneous at the acinar level, and very positive in the hyperplasic ducts, compared to the alcoholic and control groups. CONCLUSIONS These qualitative valorations indicate the differences between the histopathologic pattern of sialosis with different origins.