Purpose: To avoid misdiagnosis, clinicopathological features were analyzed in cases of cervical mucinous adenocarcinoma with solitary ovarian metastatic masses.
Patients and methods: Three cases misdiagnosed as primary ovarian adenocarcinoma before surgery were filtered from the database of the Cancer Hospital/Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences from January 1998 to December 2016. The clinical data were thoroughly collected and compared, and both frozen and paraffin-embedded pathological sections were reviewed by two expert pathologists.
Results: None of the patients experienced cervical contact bleeding, and no typical cervical neoplasms were found. The cervical canals were slightly thickened in two patients, as detected by either palpation or imaging. The high-risk human papillomavirus (HPV) test results were all negative, and the thin-prep cytologic test (TCT) screened only one case of atypical glandular epithelial cells. All cases were indicative of higher serum CA19-9 levels (79.49-6124 U/mL). The ovarian masses showed no regular laterality, while they were all cystic or solid-cystic. Their pathological sections indicated a benign appearance of the capsule tissue with well-differentiated mucinous glands infiltrating the ovarian cortex with focal necrosis.
Conclusion: Attention should be paid to cervical examinations before and during surgery for cervical mucinous adenocarcinoma with a metastatic ovarian mass as the first manifestation. Such patients may gain a better prognosis after active treatment.
Keywords: cervical mucinous adenocarcinoma; clinicopathological feature; metastatic ovarian mucinous adenocarcinoma; misdiagnosis; occult primary lesion; solitary ovarian metastasis.
© 2020 Liu et al.