CASE REPORT
Surgical Treatment of a Gastric Cancer
in a Pregnant Woman without Performing
Abortion
More details
Hide details
1
Harran University, Medical Faculty, Sanliurfa,
Turkey
2
Gaziantep University, Medical Faculty,
Department of General Surgery, Gaziantep,
Turkey
Publication date: 2010-01-12
Corresponding author
Alpaslan Terzi
Department of General Surgery, Faculty
of Medicine, Harran University,
63200, Sanliurfa, Turkey
Eur J Gen Med 2010;7(1):111-113
KEYWORDS
ABSTRACT
Gastric cancer during pregnancy is extremely rare and there are
problems in its diagnosis and treatment due to the presence of
fetus. Beside the difficulties in diagnosis owing to the common
symptoms of pregnancy, there are different practices during
treatment procedure. Major concern in these cases is the situation
of the fetus. There are different views on whether terminate
the pregnancy or keep it until the term. It is undisputable that
there must be not only medical but also ethical, social, cultural
and religious considerations during decision making process.
In this report, we planned to present our treatment process,
medical outcomes, ethical issues and family involvement in a 23
weeks pregnant woman with gastric cancer. We performed total
gastrectomy to the patient before the termination of pregnancy.
There was no problem either in the mother or in the fetus at
post-op stage. After 3 months, the patient gave birth to a healthy
child in term. There was no recurrence or metastasis in postop
9th month control. This information suggests us to be more
sensitive on trying to keep fetuses alive until the term and reevaluate
our ‘reflexive’ attitude on terminating the pregnancy.
Furthermore, we believe that terminating the pregnancy may –and
will- cause biological and psychological trauma on mother which
may –and will- affect the prognosis negatively.