“Deciphering Dysmenorrhea in an Adolescent Girl with Borderline Ovarian Tumour”: A Case Report on an Accessory and Cavitated Uterine Mass (ACUM)

In: Indian Journal of Gynecologic Oncology · 2022 · vol. 21(1) · doi:10.1007/s40944-022-00686-1 · W4311781583
article OA: closed CC0
Full text JSON View on OpenAlex View at publisher
AI-generated summary by gemini-2.5-flash-lite+body, 2026-07-09

This case report describes an adolescent with severe dysmenorrhea and borderline ovarian tumor who was also diagnosed with and surgically treated for an accessory and cavitated uterine mass.

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

AI-generated deep summary by claude@2026-07, 2026-07-09 · read from full text

This case report describes a late-adolescent girl with severe, refractory dysmenorrhea since menarche, whose ovarian tumour was diagnosed coincidentally during imaging work-up. MRI detected a small myometrial lesion (10×8 mm) that met criteria for accessory and cavitated uterine mass (ACUM), and the patient underwent exploratory laparotomy with fertility-sparing staging using frozen section, along with excision of the ACUM, which was confirmed histologically as ACUM concurrent with stage 1a serous borderline ovarian tumour. A key limitation is that this is a single patient report, so diagnostic and symptom-attribution conclusions cannot be generalized. This paper is centrally about endometriosis and/or adenomyosis only in the sense that it focuses on dysmenorrhea and includes differential discussion of diffuse adenomyosis, while the main condition studied is accessory and cavitated uterine mass (ACUM).

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

Full text 4,783 characters · extracted from oa-doi-fallback · 4 sections · click to expand

Abstract

Background Accessory and cavitated uterine mass (ACUM) is a newly recognized Mullerian anomaly and essentially a benign lesion. The normal-looking uterine cavity makes it different from other Mullerian anomalies. ACUMs are included in Group 4 of the updated embryological-clinical classification for female genito-urinary malformations published in Human Reproduction Update. The usual presentation is refractory dysmenorrhea in young females not responding to usual drugs. TVUS and MRI is utilised to reach the diagnosis. The common differential diagnosis are diffuse adenomyosis, myoma, and adenomyoma. Owing to its new identity among the causes of severe dysmenorrhea, its recognition is of great importance for girls suffering from the monthly agony. Our case is novel with respect to findings of concurrent ACUM and borderline ovarian tumour where treating surgeon will have tendency to give more importance to the management of the ovarian neoplasia. The idea behind reporting this case is to increase awareness for concurrent surgical treatment of benign lesions in the eligible patients. Case Presentation We are reporting a case following the CARE guidelines. A girl in her late adolescence was referred to our tertiary care oncology centre with an imaging suggestive of an ovarian tumour diagnosed coincidentally during work up for dysmenorrhea. Her chief complaints were severe and refractory dysmenorrhea since menarche. On MRI, the coexisting tiny lesion measuring 10*8 mm within the myometrium caught our attention as a probable cause of dysmenorrhea. The lesion fulfilled all the criteria for ACUM. Accordingly, she was planned for exploratory laparotomy and proceed with frozen section. The procedure executed was fertility-sparing staging of borderline tumour along with excision of the ACUM. The histopathology report confirmed it to be a stage 1a serous borderline ovarian tumour with concurrent ACUM. The patient has been planned for observation and is currently free of dysmenorrhea.

Conclusions

The diagnosis of ACUM is essential for its timely and appropriate treatment. Early surgical treatment can provide the symptom relief to these young women. Similar content being viewed by others

References

Azuma Y, Taniguchi F, Wibisono H, Ikebuchi A, Moriyama M, Harada T. A case report of an accessory and cavitated uterine mass treated with total laparoscopic hysterectomy. Yonago Acta Med. 2021;64(2):207–9. Jain N, Verma R. Imaging diagnosis of accessory and cavitated uterine mass, a rare mullerian anomaly. Indian J Radiol Imaging. 2014;24(2):178–81. Acien P, Bataller A, Fernandez F, Acien MI, Rodriguez JM, Mayol MJ. New cases of accessory and cavitated uterine masses (ACUM): a significant cause of severe dysmenorrhea and recurrent pelvic pain in young women. Hum Reprod. 2012;27(3):683–94. Acien P, Acien MI. The history of female genital tract malformation classifications and proposal of an updated system. Hum Reprod Update. 2011;17(5):693–705. Bedaiwy MA, Henry DN, Elguero S, Pickett S, Greenfield M. Accessory and cavitated uterine mass with functional endometrium in an adolescent: diagnosis and laparoscopic excision technique. J Pediatr Adolesc Gynecol. 2013;26(4):e89-91.

Acknowledgements

Not applicable. Funding None. Author information Authors and Affiliations Contributions DB, A, UB, DB and RJ contributed in writing the manuscript. A did the literature search. AD performed the histological examination of the surgical specimens. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. Corresponding author Ethics declarations Conflict of interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. Ethical Approval The manuscript has been read and approved by all the authors, that the requirements for authorship have been met, and each author believes that the manuscript represents honest work. Additional information Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Rights and permissions Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law. About this article Cite this article Barmon, D., Aparajita, Baruah, U. et al. “Deciphering Dysmenorrhea in an Adolescent Girl with Borderline Ovarian Tumour”: A Case Report on an Accessory and Cavitated Uterine Mass (ACUM). Indian J Gynecol Oncolog 21, 9 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40944-022-00686-1 Received: Revised: Accepted: Published: Version of record: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40944-022-00686-1

Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

Ask this paper AI returns verbatim quotes from the full text · source: oa-doi-fallback

Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works

Condition tags

dysmenorrhea

Citation neighborhood (no data yet)

We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. The paper's references may be in our DB but unresolved to ``paper_id`` (resolution happens at ingest when the cited DOI matches a row we already have). Run the cross-source citation reconcile pass to retry.

References (5)

Source provenance

openalex
last seen: 2026-06-04T00:00:01.174412+00:00
License: CC0 · commercial use OK