Abstract
A 79-year-old woman had undergone total gastrectomy for gastric cancer 5 years earlier, and the pathological diagnosis showed poorly differentiated adenocarcinoma, Stage IB (pT2, N0, M0), according to the Japanese classification of gastric carcinoma. Adjuvant chemotherapy was not employed considering the relatively early cancer and R0 resection.
Following the primary surgery, annual routine colonoscopy revealed multiple submucosal tumors suggested by biopsy to be poorly differentiated adenocarcinoma. Computed tomography and positron emission tomography did not show other organ metastases or abdominal dissemination. We performed subtotal colectomy. Finally, the lesions were definitively diagnosed as metastatic colon cancer derived from the gastric cancer based on pathological findings and cytokeratin immunostaining.
Metastatic colon cancer is rare, comprising 0.1∼1% of all colon cancers, and almost all cases are metastases from progressive cancers. Colonic metastasis of stage I gastric cancer is extremely rare and to our knowledge, only four cases including the present have been reported in Japan. We thus present this case with a review of the literature.
