Rodrigo Athayde Nemésio, Ricardo Martins, Maria Augusta Cipriano, José Guilherme Tralhão and Francisco Castro e Sousa
Spontaneous regression of cancer is a rare phenomenon, often of obscure etiology. We present the case of a 51-year-old female patient, whose colorectal liver metastases, diagnosed by CT scan and confirmed by MRI and per-operative US scan, underwent spontaneous necrosis, as demonstrated by pathological examination. She was submitted to left colectomy, splenectomy and total hysterectomy six years earlier followed by adjuvant chemotherapy, as treatment of the primary tumour (adenocarcinoma of the splenic angle of the colon, staged as pT3,N1,M0). She underwent a right hepatectomy to treat liver metastases, located in the segments VIII and V/VI of the liver; to date, she remains asymptomatic and disease-free. We hope this case may contribute to the characterization of a subset of patients whose malignancy spontaneously regresses, which may prove decisive in the development of new strategies for cancer treatment.
