Synchronous double cancers of the colon and the pancreas: a case report

G. Li Destri, A. Giarrizzo, N. Bellavia, R. Milazzotto, M.E. Frattalone, B. Scilletta, A. Di Cataldo

Department of Surgical Sciences, Organ Transplantation and Advanced Technologies, University of Catania, Italy. g.lidestri@unict.it

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• Surgery

The authors report a clinical case of a synchronous double cancer of the colon and pancreas. Having carefully examined the scarce literature, they dwell on the incidence of this disease referring to frequencies that in the literature range from 0.06% and 0.55% while considering that some series do not show any association between the two neoplasms. The authors analyze the role of the colorectal follow-up. In fact, such a follow-up, even if only providing a relative improvement in disease-free survival, has allowed for a treatment of the two certainly not-advanced tumors ensuring the patient a good prognosis. Finally, the authors analyze how endoscopic ultrasound-guided fine-needle aspiration made possible a preoperative diagnosis of small pancreatic cancer, and show that, the positive predictive value (PPV) of this method was 100%.

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