Tuberculosis of a Single Lumbar Vertebra Presenting with a Solitary Local Osteolytic Lesion in Young Adults: A Report of Five Cases

Spinal tuberculosis in its classical form (i.e., “two-vertebra disease with the destruction of the intervening intervertebral disc and a paravertebral or psoas abscess”) is easily recognized and readily treated [1] in areas where tuberculosis is endemic [2-4]. Atypical spinal tuberculosis without the aforementioned clinical or radiographic features [5], although occurring less frequently [6], has been well documented [6-8]. However, only a few articles had reported the isolated tuberculosis which involved a single vertebral body [1,9,10]. Single vertebra tuberculosis presenting with a local solitary osteolytic lesion in normal architecture of the vertebral body is exceedingly rare in spinal tuberculosis, and there is limited information about this entity in the English-language literature [1,2,5,6-10].