Although the incidence of tuberculosis has decreased recently, tuberculous cervical lymphadenitis is one of the most common cause of neck mass in Korea. But the diagnosis and treatment of this disease are still in cotroversy. The polymerase chain reaction(PCR) is now widely applied to test very small amount of pathogen and would be detect Mycobacterium tuberculosis in biopsied tissues and fine needle aspiration. We performed the PCR using PT-1 and PT-2 primers in 15 samples from tuberculous cervical lymphadenitis patients, and 10 sample from non-tuberculous cervical lymphadenopathy patients from September, 1994 to April, 1995. The results were as follows : 1) The positive rates of AFB stain, AFB culture and PCR were 20.0%(3/15), 13.3%(2/15) and 60.0%(9/15) in 15 cases diagnosed as tuberculous lymphadenitis by fine needle aspiration cytology. 2) None of 10 non-tuberculous lymphadenitis cases were positive PCR results. In patients with suspected tuberculous lymphadenitis, PCR could be used to detect Mycobacterium tuberculosis using fine needle aspirates with good sensitivity and specificity.