A 54-year-old woman is recovering in hospital in Italy after a 42-pound tumor was removed from one of her ovaries.
The patient first went to see her gynecologist after feeling a sense of heaviness and constant pain in her lower abdomen. A few weeks later she was undergoing emergency surgery to remove a 16-inch mass from her pelvis at the Sant'Anna hospital in Turin. For context, ovaries rarely exceed 1.5 inches in length.
The hospital described the mass as "an ovarian tumor of record dimensions." However, in 2018, a woman in Connecticut had surgery to remove a benign mucinous ovarian tumor weighing 132 pounds.
According to Sant'Anna hospital, the patient had previously been diagnosed with an ovarian cyst in 2019 of just under 3 inches. However, at the time her doctors told her that it was not malignant and therefore not a cause for concern.
Four years later, the "enormous" tumor had more than quadrupled in size and had grown to occupy her entire abdomen. The patient was admitted to hospital for emergency treatment and, after a series of examinations, her doctors confirmed the presence of an ovarian mucinous neoplasm in its first stage.
The team of doctors at the Sant'Anna hospital said that the patient was extremely lucky to have had the cancer diagnosed and surgically removed before her situation worsened.
"The immediate intervention markedly changed the patient's prognosis, restoring her an excellent quality of life," the hospital said in a statement.
The hospital emphasized the importance of regular check ups and attention to any chronic pain in the pelvic area to facilitate effective and timely treatment.
Mucinous neoplasms are excessive growths of tissue that arise from the internal lining of organs, in this case the ovaries. The majority of these growths are benign, but a small percentage can become malignant and result in ovarian cancer.
Ovarian cancer is the second-most common gynecologic cancer in the Unites States, with roughly 10 new ovarian cancer cases reported for every 100,000 woman each year, according to data from the National Cancer Institute. As of 2020, there were roughly 236,500 women living with ovarian cancer across the country.
Ovarian cancer accounts for approximately 1 percent of all new cancer cases in the U.S. and roughly 2.2 percent of all cancer deaths.
According to the Sant'Anna hospital, patients treated for early stage ovarian cancer have a 75 to 95 percent 5-year survival rate. However, this drops to only 40 percent for tumors caught during the more advanced stages of the disease.
Uncommon Knowledge
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About the writer
Pandora Dewan is a Senior Science Reporter at Newsweek based in London, UK. Her focus is reporting on science, health ... Read more
