Mann died after bendel- worm inside him got cancer – Dagbladet.no

(Dagbladet): It proves to be an extremely rare cause of a 41 year old man from Colombia developed tumors in the lungs and died, writes LiveScience.

The doctors discovered that the rapidly growing tumors not consisted of human cells, but stemmed from a tapeworm man had inside him.

It emerges from a study published in renowned New England Journal of Medicine.

– Astounded

This is the first known case of a person being sick of cancer cells that develop in a parasite, the researchers wrote.

– We were amazed when we discovered this new type of disease – tapeworms that grow inside a person develops cancer then spreads to person and cause cancerous tumors with him, says pathologist at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Infectious Diseases Pathology Branch (IDPB) and one of The researchers behind the report, Dr. Atis Muehlenbach.

The diagnosis in this special unusual case posed by a collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control in the United States and the Natural History Museum in the UK, the BBC writes.

The patient who died had HIV, which weakened immune his and probably made possible the development of cancer cells in the parasite, researchers claim.

Fever, weight loss and coughing

Although the researchers never previously been involved in a similar case, point out the authors that both tapeworm and HIV affects millions of people worldwide.

– It may therefore be more cases that have not been discovered, says Muehlenbach.

41-year-old sought medical care in Colombia after he for months had been suffering from fever, cough and weight loss. He had been diagnosed with HIV ten years earlier, but should not have taken his medicine.

The biopsy of the cancer cells in the lungs was so startling that doctors in Colombia chose to contact infection control expertise.

Under microscope could see the expertise that the cells behaved like cancer cells that divided rapidly and accumulated in tumors. But the cells did not seem to be human cancer cells, when they were ten times less.

Found DNA from tapeworms

After several studies, researchers found DNA from one type of tapeworm called H. nana in man’s tumors .

The researchers’ hypothesis is that the tapeworm could grow inside him without his immune system reacted because his immune system was weakened by HIV infection. Eventually seem tapeworm cells have mutated and become cancer cells.

41-year-old died just 72 hours after the researchers had found that the cancer his stemmed from tapeworm.

H. nana is the most common type of tapeworm that occur in humans. At any given time, it is located in approximately 75 million people around the world.

– Very interesting

– This is a very interesting case, as it may shed light on the relationship between infections and cancer, said Dr. Gunnar Hasle at Travel Clinic to Dagbladet.

Hasle has a thorough knowledge of how parasites operate.

– The patient in question was an HIV patient with very poor immune system, and apparently had nothing to set against these cancer cells. There is no reason to believe that cancer cells from this parasite could provide the illness with an immune healthy person. Although this is the first described case, we do not know whether this could be one of many cases. These scientists could make a diagnosis on the basis of advanced DNA technology, which is not available in most poor countries. In most poor countries would this case have passed as cancer of unknown origin, Hasle says.

The expert in travel medicine says that the current tapeworm Hymenolepis nana (H. nana) often called dwarf tapeworm, but that name is confusing because there is something called the dog dwarf tapeworm (E. granulosus) and foxes dwarf tapeworm (Echinococcus multilocilaris).

The dog dwarf tapeworms live in the intestines of dogs, but form large cysts in the lungs, liver or brain of people who are unfortunate enough to ingest eggs from a dog that is a carrier. Fox dwarf tapeworm can grow just like a cancer in people with normal immune systems.

– H. nana live their adult lives in the intestines of people and it is very rare that it exists outside the intestine. Parasites living elsewhere than in the gut when they infect people, must have mechanisms to evade the immune system, but H. nana do not live in direct contact with the human immune system, and as far as I know no such mechanisms, says Gunnar Hasle.

– Very unusual

– This is very special. A clear prerequisite for this to happen, was that the patient was severe immunodeficiency, says department head and senior consultant at the Department of Infectious Diseases at Ahus, Jan-Erik Berdal, told Dagbladet.

Berdal points out that it is also very unusual for H. nana establishing themselves outside the intestine, which in this case also probably attributable to 41-year-old’s weakened immune system because of his untreated HIV infection.

Infection medics also points out that a normal development of tapeworm actually seems to depend of a normal immune system of the host.

– In this case the serpent cancer cells obviously got to establish themselves in the host, which is also very special, says Berdal. He stressed that this is something healthy people do not need to fear.

– The postulate of the researchers behind this study is that millions of people are infected with HIV, and that this worm is very common in poor areas where HIV is not treated. Thus, they believe that this can be a more widespread problem than this single case implies, but nobody actually knows the really nothing about, says Berdal.