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Doctor who has performed hundreds of autopsies reveals how people 'unknowingly' die of cancer
In 2025, it is predicted that more than 600,000 people will die of cancer in the United States - but within that is a small number who don't even know they have it.
While many of these people are treated after their cancer is detected, a pathologist has revealed that he has come across several who unknowingly passed away from the deadly disease.
Dr. Wolfe, who has performed numerous autopsies to determine people's cause of death, recently posted a shocking TikTok sharing three stories from within the last few months.
In the video, he explained that whilst it is not common, he has performed several autopsies on people - of all different ages - finding their cause of death is not what medics originally thought.
The doctor began by discussing how one man had complained of a chronic cough before he died which he had blamed on his smoking.
'He finally gets so severe, where he can't stop coughing. Now, he's coughing up blood, he gets taken to the ER and they do imaging and he has a complete white out on his lungs,' he explained.
'He then codes and dies,' he continued. 'He comes to the autopsy table and I find he does have a horrible pneumonia - one of the worst pneumonias I've ever seen in my career - but as I went through the lung I realized the reason why there was pneumonia.
'It was because there was a cancerous tumor, a small cell carcinoma of the lung that was encasing the airway,' he explained. 'So what happens is it grows into the airway and closes the airway off and causes a pneumonia behind that, it's called the post obstructive pneumonia secondary to malignancy.'
He added that pneumonia is not the cause of death, but the 'end point' of the actual underlying cause, which is cancer.
'Without the cancerous tumor blocking the airway, you wouldn't have had the pneumonia,' Dr. Wolfe explained.
The doctor then listed another example with a younger patient, who was a man in his early 20s.
'[He had] had several months of abdominal pain, weight loss and fevers, also night sweats, and he refused to go to the doctor to investigate this.'
'Then the pain became so intense that he finally did go to the ER and they thought it was going to be some kind of appendicitis or ruptured organ,' the medical professional continued.
Sadly, the young man didn't even make it to the CT scanner before he passed away.
'He wasn't able to be revived,' he somberly recalled.
When the man was taken to Dr. Wolfe to perform an autopsy, he found him riddled with cancer.
'I opened him up and found cancer in essentially every organ from his clavicles to his pelvis, also in the abdominal wall and the omentum [tissue that drapes over the intestines],' he recalled.
The doctor said it was a non-Hodgkin's lymphoma case, explaining: 'The tumor burden just gets so high it messes up the electrolytes for the patient and then they develop cardiac arrhythmia.'
The last patient was a 65-year-old man who had colon cancer symptoms, but passed away before he could have a colonoscopy.
'I [did] the autopsy to determine the cause of death and it turns out he did actually have stage four colon cancer that was metastatic widely throughout his abdomen, and also into his lungs and had basically grown through the wall of the colon,' he shared.
As per Healthline, there is no definitive length of time someone can have cancer without knowing it, explaining that some cancers can be present for months or years before they're detected.
According to a 1990 report from the National Library of Medicine, 11 percent of patients over a 25-year period died from cancer without it being diagnosed.
As per the report, over 20,000 autopsies were carried out over a 25-year period, with 700 cancers (11 percent) were found in patients in whom the diagnosis of cancer had not been considered relevant clinically.
Doctors always recommend regularly visiting a doctor for health screenings.
