A Case of Bowel Obstruction due to Sigmoid Colon Endometriosis after Finishing Breast Cancer Hormone Therapy

The paper reports a single case of a 40-year-old woman who developed severe lower abdominal to perianal pain and intestinal passage disturbance due to sigmoid colon and Douglas pouch mass lesions after completing tamoxifen hormone therapy for left breast cancer. After exploratory laparotomy found circumferential sigmoid colon tumorous lesions and a firm Douglas pouch nodule, the authors performed partial sigmoid resection with intraoperative frozen section confirming endometriosis, leaving the Douglas pouch lesion unresected, and then treated postoperatively with a GnRH agonist plus dienogest until the lesions disappeared. A key limitation is that the report is a single-patient case, so causality and generalizability are limited. The paper provides a clinical context in which hormone therapy discontinuation is associated with onset of sigmoid colon endometriosis causing bowel obstruction, directly relating to endometriosis. This paper is centrally about endometriosis — sigmoid colon endometriosis presenting as bowel obstruction after stopping breast cancer tamoxifen therapy.

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