Cystic mucinous tumours of the mesentery and retroperitoneum: report of three cases

Abstract

A mucinous cystadenoma of the mesentery and two borderline mucinous cystadenocarcinomas of the mesentery and retroperitoneum are reported. The patients were females, aged 38, 47 and 58 years. The cysts showed identical features to those commonly seen in the appendix and ovary. One of our cases, with 'borderline' histology, developed metastases to mediastinal lymph nodes, 4 years after diagnosis. We suggest that these tumours develop through mucinous metaplasia in pre-existing mesothelium-lined cysts, the latter being the commonest cysts in this location.

Primary mucinous cystadenocarcinoma of the retroperitoneum

“…P R M C would develop from such epithelium, probably after its mucinous transformation. The observation of mesotheliu m and typical mucinous epithelium next to cystadenocarcinomatous foci on the cyst lining [1,2] supports this theory. In the same way, coelomic metaplasia has been proposed as a likely origin for peritoneal endometriosis [4] and has also been defended by those who consider peritoneum as a secondary mfillerian system [6,7,8].…”

“…The lack of intestinal m u c o s e or smooth muscle structures in the 13 published cases does not support the bowel duplication hypothesis. The fourth histogenetic hypothesis supports an origin from a peritoneal inclusion cyst, assuming that its mesothelial lining has undergone metaplasia to a coelomic epithelium similar to the ovarian one [1,2,11]. P R M C would develop from such epithelium, probably after its mucinous transformation.…”

Primary Retroperitoneal Cystoadenocarcinoma: A Systematic Review

“…PRC is a rare tumour with only 71 cases reported in literature from 1977 to 2015 [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59]; to our knowledge, our work is the first systematic review in this field (until the date we performed it). It was interesting to note that more than half of the articles reported (35) were published after 2000: it could be probably due to an improvement in the radiological and pathological diagnostics and maybe due to the possibility of acquiring better knowledge of the disease.…”

Primary Retroperitoneal Mucinous Cystadenocarcinoma: A Case Report and Review of the Literature

“…This may hold true for some cases [6] . Enterogenous duplication cyst as the real site of origin is considered by others [7] .…”

“…The other 3 cases who died due to the mucinous carcinoma were not treated by chemotherapy. Preoperative diagnosis remains difficult, since the retroperitoneal localization of the tumor is often misdiagnosed on ultrasound or CT scan [7,8,11,15,23,25,28,39,42,43] .…”