Experience With Surgery for Synchronous Metastatic Lung Tumors From Colon and Thyroid Cancer

Abstract

Chest computed tomography (CT) demonstrated a solitary nodular shadow in the right middle lobe of the lung of a 74-year-old woman. She had undergone hemithyroidectomy for sclerosing follicular thyroid carcinoma 26 years ago and right hemicolectomy and sigmoidectomy for multicentric colon cancer 2 years ago. The clinical diagnosis of the lung nodule was a metastatic lung tumor from the former colon cancer. Wide wedge resection of right S4a was performed. Pathological diagnosis revealed not only the metastatic colon cancer with the interlobular lymph node involvement but also an incidental metastatic thyroid papillary carcinoma. Completion total thyroidectomy and regional lymph node dissection were performed subsequently, and this revealed primary multiple occult papillary carcinomas in the residual thyroid. This was a very rare case in which an incidental metastatic lung lesion of thyroid cancer was revealed in a specimen of resected lung metastasis from colon cancer, and led to treatment of the second primary thyroid cancer.




J Med Cases. 2014;5(9):491-494
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14740/jmc1913w