Background: Parotid gland tumors are a frequent to establish the sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of fine-needle aspiration (FNA), for distinguishing benign from malignant lesions in the parotid gland we carried out this study. Moreover we studied the epidemiological facts of the parotid masses.

Methods: Retrospective review of all the patients who underwent a parotidectomy in our department during the last five years and in which a FNA was performed as a diagnostic method of parotid mass, were studied in order to compare the citologic and histologic findings after excision.

Results: Sex and age distribution of the parotid gland tumors varies in relation to the histological results. The most prevalent tumor was the pleomorphic adenoma followed by Whartin tumor. A 25% were malignant and a 75% benign. The citological findings match with histological results in 70.96% of the cases. The FNA allows us to exclude malignancy in a 94.8% of all cases but misdiagnose a 5.2% of malignant masses.

Conclusions: We found parotid gland FNA study to be a safe and accurate technique to rule out malignancy in parotid gland masses. No relevant side effects were observed. The global accuracy of the parotid gland FNA is above 70% in our study. So we do recommend the FNA as a part of the diagnostic protocol in parotid gland masses.

Conflict of interest: None declared.