Mesothelioma with Non-pleural Malignancy: A Red Herring or Just an Uncommon Pairing?
Andrew J Drain , Kourosh Saeb-Parsy , Amit K Shah , D Rassl and Andrew J
Ritchie
Papworth Hospital, Papworth Everard, Cambridge CB3 8RE, UK
Journal of
Cardiothoracic Surgery 2006
A BMC open access article
Published: 1 November 2006
Abstract
Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is a highly aggressive cancer of the
pleura with a well-established male predominance and causative link with
asbestos exposure. We report four cases of female patients with MPM referred for
palliation of symptoms thought to be due to previous non-pleural malignancy.
With emerging novel treatments for MPM, this article discusses four unusual
cases of MPM occurring in the setting of other malignancy, highlights the
importance of considering a primary diagnosis of MPM even in patients with other
malignancy, and reinforces the benefits of video-assisted surgical biopsy which
allows simultaneous diagnosis and treatment.
The complete article is available in
PDF format
Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery 2006, 1:39doi:10.1186/1749-8090-1-39
The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found
online at: http://www.cardiothoracicsurgery.org/content/1/1/39
© 2006 Drain et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly cited.

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