You are here

Article Text

Article menu

Download PDFPDF

Case Reports: Rare disease
Primary small intestine angiosarcoma mimicking Crohn’s disease
  1. Prasanthan Thaveenthiran1,2,
  2. Lily Bae1,
  3. Chandika Wewelwala1 and
  4. Kevin Zhou3
  1. 1General Surgery, Monash Health, Clayton, Victoria, Australia
  2. 2Trauma, National Trauma Research Institute, The Alfred Hospital, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
  3. 3Radiology, Monash Health, Clayton, Victoria, Australia
  1. Correspondence to Dr Prasanthan Thaveenthiran; prasanthan1{at}hotmail.com

Abstract

A man in his 40s presented to an emergency department after experiencing worsening abdominal pain for 2 days. Contrast-enhanced CT of the abdomen and pelvis revealed circumferential mural thickening and luminal narrowing of the distal ileum and upstream dilatation of the small intestine, indicating small intestine obstruction. This prompted emergency laparotomy, where two lesions in the distal ileum were identified as the source of his bowel obstruction and resected. Immunohistochemistry of the resected segment revealed a primary small intestine angiosarcoma acting positively for vascular markers ERG and CD31. A subsequent positron emission tomography (PET) scan revealed positive mediastinal metastatic lymphadenopathy without organ metastases.

Following his surgery, the patient recovered well and was promptly referred to an oncology unit at a specialised health centre for further treatment. Primary small intestine angiosarcoma is a rare entity in which patients present with non-specific symptoms requiring prompt tissue diagnosis to facilitate multidisciplinary management.

  • Surgery
  • Small intestine cancer
  • Gastroenterology
  • Small intestine
  • Gastrointestinal surgery

https://doi.org/10.1136/bcr-2023-255424

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Contributors PT, as one of the surgical registrars directly involved in the case, initiated the writing of the case report and research on the topic, initial draft copy was written by him and worked on revising the content in collaboration with other authors. He is the guarantor and the primary author. LB as one of the senior surgical registrars also additionally worked on research material, revising the content to add additional material to the case report. KZ as a senior radiology registrar assisted with obtaining scanned images and also revised the relevant sections of the case report. CW as the surgical consultant directly involved in the case, revised the content along with other coauthors to add additional material to the case report.

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Case reports provide a valuable learning resource for the scientific community and can indicate areas of interest for future research. They should not be used in isolation to guide treatment choices or public health policy.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.