Tongue necrosis and systemic vascular amyloidosis.

Tongue necrosis is a rare but dramatic clinical finding, which is most often related to infection, trauma, malignancy, or vasculitis. We describe an extremely unusual case in which systemic amyloid deposition in small arteries caused by senile systemic amyloidosis was associated with necrosis of the tongue as well as necrosis of portions of the bowel. To our knowledge, this is the first report of ischemic tongue necrosis resulting from vascular amyloidosis.