Chennai: A 35-year-old patient from the city was treated for a rare disease called zygomycosis or gastrointestinal mucormycosis by the doctors of Lifeline Institute of Minimal Access (LIMA), recently.
The patient was admitted with a series of complaints including abdominal pain, weight loss and occasional bleeding while passing stools, etc.
Further, imaging with a CT and PET scan revealed high suspicion of stomach cancer spread to surrounding nodes and a few distant nodes as well, two more biopsies were undertaken which were again inconclusive, but possibly a disease called eosinophilic gastritis.
The medical team decided to treat the patient with the appropriate empirical medicines which involved a regimen of steroids. However, the patient did not show much improvement even after two weeks of steroid therapy which was confirmed by repeating the endoscopy test.
With the fourth biopsy test, the doctors eliminated the suspicion of malignancy. With the final results, the medical team found an aggressive type of fungus in the stomach, an infectious disease which carries a very high mortality; it required an urgent surgical intervention with high-end anti-fungal drugs to remove all the infected tissues under cover of the anti-fungal medications.
Addressing a press conference in the city recently, LIMA chairman and chief surgeon, Dr J S Rajkumar, said, “We proceeded to perform an immediate total gastrectomy procedure where the complete stomach and surrounding nodes were removed and joined the small intestine to the food-pipe. The surgical procedure was done through a minimally invasive laparoscopic approach.”
The doctor further stated that this was the second case of stomach fungus operation and removal to be reported from India and the first survivor.
It is learnt that the surgery took five hours to complete and a team of six surgeons and an anesthetist were involved in the operation.