Choriocarcinoma in Infant and Mother

Abstract

A 2‐month‐old female baby was noticed to have liver tumor. A hemangioma of the right lobe was suspected from the findings by celiac angiography. Histologic findings of the surgically resected material revealed choriocarcinoma of the liver. At autopsy, multiple metastatic nodules were found in the lungs, but remnant liver, ovaries, uterus, mediastinum, and sacrococcygeal region were free of tumor. The ovary had several thecalutein cysts, and the endometrium of the uterus showed pseudodecidual change of the stroma. The mother died two months later. Although histologic materials were not available, the clinical findings including a high value of serum HCG seemed to show that she had been affected by choriocarcinoma. The most probable origin of the choriocarcinoma in the infant from the mother is discussed.

Infantile choriocarcinoma: a case report with MRI, angiography and bone scintigraphy

“…Infantile choriocarcinoma is rare, previously reported in only 14 cases (8 females and 6 males) in the world [1][2][3][4]. Maternal choriocarcinoma was observed in 9 of these cases (7 females.and 2 males).…”

“…We suspected malignant hepatic angioma because of a pooling sign on the celiac anglogram and multiple lung tumors. However, marked hypervascularity of hepatic choriocarcinoma and a [3,4].…”

Unexplained anaemia and failure to thrive as initial symptoms of infantile choriocarcinoma: a review

“…Surgery [2,9,19,24,36] or single agent chemotherapy [1,3,10,22] alone (methotrexate monotherapy [3,10], doxorubicin plus dexamethasone [1,22]) did not alter the prognosis. Seven infants received combined modality treatment including a platinum-containing chemotherapy [5,6,14,15,16,32,33], in five of these patients a sustained remission was achieved by combining multiagent chemotherapy with delayed (4/5) [6,14,15,33] or primary tumour resection (1/5) [5].…”

“…This may lead to haematogenous metastases in the mother and/or offspring resulting in early infantile death. To the authors' knowledge, 30 different neonates and infants including two stillbirths affected by the disease have been reported in the literature [1,2,3,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,29,30,32,33,35,36]. The prognosis of affected children may be improved by early diagnosis and institution of the appropriate treatment, as demonstrated in five infants [5,6,14,15,33].…”

“…Of the 29 women on whom information is given, 17 (59%) developed maternal choriocarcinoma [1,2,3,7,10,13,14,15,18,23,24,25,27,29,30,35,36] (Table 2). A fatal outcome was reported in 3/17 women [2,10,24], for one affected woman a partial response and no further information on the final outcome was reported [3], for one affected mother no information was given on treatment and outcome [36]; thus in 15 mothers affected by maternal choriocarcinoma, detailed information on maternal follow-up is available and 12 of these 15 women (80%) achieved a complete remission.…”