Abstract
Corynosoma is a parasite that can normally be found in the intestinal tract of fish-eating mammals, particularly in seals and birds. The present case proposed that Corynosoma could attain full maturity in the human intestine. A 70-year-old female complained of abdominal pain. A computed tomography (CT) scan revealed a swelling of the intraperitoneal lymph nodes with no responsible lesion. Video capsule endoscopy and double-balloon endoscopy detected several ulcerations and one parasite in the ileum, which was tightly attached at the bottom of the ulcerations. The parasite was cylindrical and measured approximately 10 mm (long) x 3 mm (wide). Pathologically, the worm had a four-layered body wall and contained embryonated eggs. The sequences of the parasite-derived nuclear ribosomal DNA fragment and mitochondrial DNA fragment of cox1 were almost identical to those of Corynosoma validum. The patient’s abdominal pain immediately improved after the administration of pyrantel pamoate (1,500 mg). Corynosoma was possibly the responsible disease in a patient who complained of abdominal pain and in whom no responsible lesion was detected by CT, gastroduodenoscopy or colonoscopy. Examinations of the small intestines should be aggressively performed in such cases.
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Abbreviations
- cf.:
-
Confer
- CT:
-
Computed tomography
- DNA:
-
Deoxyribonucleic acid
- cox1:
-
Cyclooxygenase1
- BLAST:
-
Basic local alignment search tool
- C. validum :
-
Corynosoma validum
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Supplementary material 1
The phylogenetic relationships among the members of the genera Corynosoma and Bolbosoma, including a clinical sample from the human intestinal lesion. Midpoint-rooted trees were generated by the maximum-likelihood method implemented in the MEGA6 genetic software program, using nucleotide sequences of nuclear ribosomal DNA (803 sites of 5.8S and internal transcribed spacers) and mitochondrial DNA (370 sites of the cox1 gene). The values of nodes are indicated as bootstrap percentages after 500 replications. Scale bars represent the estimated number of substitutions per nucleotide site. The database accession numbers of original sequences are given in parentheses. (A) The nuclear ribosomal DNA tree, including 10 taxa. (B) The mitochondrial DNA tree, including 9 taxa. (TIFF 8492 kb)
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Takahashi, K., Ito, T., Sato, T. et al. Infection with fully mature Corynosoma cf. validum causes ulcers in the human small intestine. Clin J Gastroenterol 9, 114–117 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12328-016-0646-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12328-016-0646-7