2 days ago
I thought my stomach pain was from giving birth... it was actually an aggressive form of colon cancer
A woman was diagnosed with terminal colon cancer just one month after giving birth.
The 37-year-old from China visited her local hospital after suffering abdominal pain and constipation for 12 days.
She had just had given birth via C-section one month prior and had no other pre-existing conditions.
A CT scan revealed an apple-sized mass in her descending colon, the longest part of the large intestine.
Doctors also found multiple lesions in the intestinal wall, lymph nodes and small intestine, suggesting advanced stage colon cancer that had formed during her pregnancy.
The anonymous woman was diagnosed with primary colorectal squamous cell carcinoma (SCC), which makes up less than one percent of all colon cancers.
Her disease was also considered a 'postpartum cancer,' meaning it formed between the start of pregnancy and up to a year after giving birth.
Doctors writing in a medical journal this week said that because the most tell-tale signs of colorectal cancer are rectal bleeding and abdominal pain, the condition can easily be mistaken for normal pregnancy and postpartum symptoms, leading to later diagnosis and more difficulty treating the cancer.
It's unclear exactly why colorectal cancer may strike during pregnancy, but elevated levels of hormones like estrogen and progesterone in pregnant women may trigger uncontrollable cell growth.
Experts estimate just 30 percent of patients with SCC survive five years after diagnosis.
The woman's case comes as 154,000 Americans are expected to be diagnosed with colorectal cancer this year.
However, colon cancer is thought to occur in just one in every 50,000 pregnancies in the US, most likely because it usually affects people over 50, past their childbearing years.
But colon cancer is on the rise in younger people, with 20,000 Americans under 50 years old being diagnosed every year.
And the latest data shows early-onset colorectal cancer diagnoses in the US are expected to rise 90 percent in people 20 to 34 years old between 2010 and 2030.
Like more common forms of colon cancer, diet, sedentary lifestyle and conditions like diabetes and obesity can raise the risk of the disease by creating inflammation in the digestive tract, which leads to cell DNA damage and dangerous mutations forming.
It's unclear if the woman in the case report had other children or lived a sedentary lifestyle, but she was found to have a mutation in her BRAF gene, which caused her cells to grow out of control and turn cancerous.
The woman underwent eight sessions of chemotherapy and three sessions of abdominal hemoperfusion, a procedure during which blood is removed and passed through cartilage to strip out toxins and immune proteins called cytokines.
She finished treatment in July 2022, seven months after her diagnosis, and had regular scans to look for recurrence. However, doctors found the cancer had returned in March 2023.
The patient died a year later in March 2024.
Colorectal squamous cell carcinoma develops from squamous cells rather than the more common adenocarcinoma cells.
SCC makes up between 0.25 and 0.5 percent of all colorectal tumors and is generally diagnosed significantly later than adenocarcinomas, and there is no specific treatment plan for it.
Doctors treating her wrote that SCC is slightly more common in woman and the average age at diagnosis is 67, making the woman in the report an early-onset case.
