Abstract
There are only 79 case reports of angiodysplasia (arteriovenous malfomation, heman-gioma) of the colon in Japan.But this disease of the colon maybe recognized with increasing frequency as a cause of lower intestinal bleeding in the elderly, because of the pathogenesis. We experienced a case of a 60-year old woman with rheumatic heart valvular disease. She had recurrent episodes of gastrointestinal bleeding of l0-year duration and repeated conventional studies were normal and the bleeding origin was unexplained. In our hospital, angiography showed two vascular ectasias in the descending colon and colonoscopy showed two angiodysplasias in the same place of the colon, one was a small blue varix-like lesion, the other was a large teleangiectasia. The pathogenesis of angiodysplasia was thought to be associated with aging degenera-tive lesion. On the basis of these hypothesis, the vascular ectasia shoud be considered as the cause of gastrointestinal bleeding in an elderly person, if conventional studies fail to reveal any lesions.
