Intestinal endometriosis combined with colorectal cancer: a case series

Masatsugu Ishii, Masashi Yamamoto, Keitaro Tanaka, Mitsuhiro Asakuma, Shinsuke Masubuchi, Hiroki Hamamoto, Hiroshi Akutagawa, Yutaro Egashira, Yoshinobu Hirose, Junji Okuda, Kazuhisa Uchiyama
Journal of medical case reports · 2018 · vol. 12(1) , pp. 21 · doi:10.1186/s13256-017-1537-3 · PMID:29378641 · PMC5789683 · W2797164700
article OA: gold CC0 ⤵ 6 in-corpus citations
📄 Open PDF View on OpenAlex View on PubMed View at publisher
⚙ AI-generated summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-07 ⓘ

This case series describes seven Japanese patients with intestinal endometriosis and colorectal cancer, highlighting diagnostic challenges and recommending laparoscopic surgery for treatment.

One-sentence paraphrase of the abstract; not a substitute for reading it. No clinical advice. How this works

⚙ AI-generated deep summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-07 ⓘ

This Japanese case series described seven patients with intestinal endometriosis and colorectal cancer who underwent laparoscopic surgery at a single center (with colonoscopy and CT preoperatively, and final histopathology confirming endometriosis). The cases involved bowel obstruction or suspicious colorectal lesions, with preoperative colonoscopic biopsy typically showing malignancy rather than endometriosis, and the major diagnostic caveat was confusion with advanced colorectal cancer with adjacent-organ invasion (T4) that required intraoperative differentiation. All resection specimens showed endometriosis on final pathology, including cases with lymphovascular adenocarcinoma involvement and some distant metastases, and one example (case 7) used intraoperative rapid diagnosis to avoid hysterectomy/oophorectomy by demonstrating no direct uterine invasion. This paper is centrally about endometriosis — specifically intestinal endometriosis coexisting with colorectal cancer and the use of laparoscopic surgery/intraoperative diagnosis to distinguish it from T4 colorectal cancer.

Read from the paper's body, not the abstract. Not a substitute for reading the paper. No clinical advice. How this works

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Intestinal endometriosis is a common benign disease among menstruating women that affects the intestinal tract. CASE PRESENTATION: This case report presents seven Japanese cases of intestinal endometriosis with colorectal cancer treated by laparoscopic surgery. Five of the seven cases reported here are women presenting with bowel obstruction due to colorectal endometriosis with colorectal cancer. It can be confused with serious lesions such as advanced colorectal cancer with peritoneal involvement or invasion of adjacent organs (T4). CONCLUSIONS: Therefore, we should consider the probability that the cause of bowel obstruction is not T4 but intestinal endometriosis. For surgical treatment, we recommend laparoscopic surgery for colorectal resection because of its benefits of differential diagnosis of T4, preserving fertility, and preventing excessive surgical stress. We performed laparoscopic resection in seven patients with intestinal endometriosis and colorectal cancer. These cases demonstrate the difficulty of establishing a differential diagnosis of intestinal endometriosis with colorectal cancer from T4.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

Condition tags

endometriosis

MeSH descriptors

Colorectal Neoplasms Endometriosis Intestinal Obstruction Aged Colorectal Neoplasms Colorectal Neoplasms Diagnosis, Differential Endometriosis Endometriosis Endometriosis Female Fertility Preservation Humans Intestinal Obstruction Intestinal Obstruction Intestinal Obstruction Japan Laparoscopy Middle Aged

Citation neighborhood

Papers in the corpus that this work cites (lower rings, blue) and that cite this one (upper rings, green). Dot size scales with the paper's in-corpus citation count — bigger dot = more influential within the endo/adeno field. Click a dot to open that paper. [ expand to 2 hops ] — adds papers reached through this work's immediate citers/citees. Heavier; up to 60 extra dots.

References (17)

Cited by (6)

Source provenance

europepmc
last seen: 2026-06-16T06:07:01.518242+00:00
openalex
last seen: 2026-06-10T17:14:06.276822+00:00
pubmed
last seen: 2026-05-13T22:20:01.354358+00:00
License: CC0 · commercial use OK