What Is a Branchial Cleft Cyst

...in the cyst that commonly occurs and this one occurs along that sternocleidomastoid muscle—the muscle from the sternum—sterno, the clavicle—cleido, mastoid, the bone behind your ear. the muscle that comes up like this to the neck. If there is a little swelling or a little draining sinus along the front edge of the sternocleidomastoid muscle, it maybe something that is a called a branchial cleft remnant or a branchial cleft cyst. If you think back to the pictures you have seen of developing embryos, they look like a fish at a certain point. it looks as though there are little gills, those are not actually gills, they were called branchial clefts and pouches and they formed the structures of your neck and your head and your face, so your jaw, the glands in your neck, the muscles in your neck—all form from those branchial pouches and clefts and the branchial arches. Sometimes, a little fragment of one of those gill-like structures gets left behind with an opening to either the inside or to the outside. If it does so, it usually appears along the sternocleidomastoid muscle and we see either swelling or a little drainage. those need to be operated on because they tend to get infected. Again, If they connect to the inside, there is bacteria inside your mouth or they connect to the outside, there is bacteria on your skin and so we would recommend operating on those. we make a little incision over the opening or over the cyst and follow it up and take out the entire track of the branchial cleft cyst.

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