A 24-year-old Caucasian man presented with an acute onset of melaena to the Emergency Department of our hospital. He had no abdominal pain, or history of change in bowel habit or any significant loss of weight or appetite. He was previously healthy and took no regular medications. He had no family history of gastrointestinal disorders. Our patient was also a non-smoker and had no history of illicit drug use.\nUpon admission, he was hypotensive and tachycardic. However, abdominal examination was completely unremarkable. Rectal examination revealed black tarry stool. Multiple dark pigmented patches were noted on the buccal mucosa of our patient. Laboratory tests revealed microcytic, hypochromic anaemia with a haemoglobin of 7.6 gm%. Blood urea was elevated at 12 mmol/litre. Initial assessment showed no other abnormalities.\nHe was resuscitated and required transfusion of six units of blood. Urgent upper gastrointestinal endoscopy revealed polyps in the stomach and duodenum, but no active bleeding sites were found. The presence of buccal pigmentation and multiple polyps on endoscopy suggested a diagnosis of PJS. A computed tomography (CT) scan of the abdomen of our patient was therefore performed. This confirmed multiple small bowel intussusceptions. (Figure )\nUrgent laparotomy was undertaken on our patient and the intussusceptions were reduced. Through enterotomies, eight polyps were removed from the affected segment of the gut. The affected segment of gut was found to be viable. He had a fairly uneventful recovery with no further bleeding. Pathological examination of the polyps confirmed hamartomas with smooth muscle arborisation, compatible with Peutz Jeghers polyps. No features of pseudo-invasion were noticed in any of the polyps. (Figure )
Our case was a 2-year-old boy who was incidentally diagnosed with anemia during the evaluation of an upper respiratory tract infection. There was no history of hematemesis, melena, or abdominal pain. The child was evaluated by the pediatric gastroenterologist with an upper gastrointestinal endoscopy and was found to have a large sessile gastric polyp that was not amenable to endoscopic resection. Physical examination was insignificant except for a few melanotic spots over the lower lip []. Radiological imaging revealed a large hyper-enhancing mass lesion in the lumen of the stomach, measuring about 8 cm in greatest dimension along with multiple small intestinal polyps. Laparotomy revealed a large sessile polyp involving the greater curvature and posterior wall of the stomach measuring about 10 cm × 8 cm along with multiple small sessile polyps involving the corpus of the stomach sparing the antrum and pylorus, requiring partial gastrectomy []. There were two more polyps, one each in the duodenum and distal jejunum in their antimesenteric border and they could be excised by enterotomy. The child had an uneventful postoperative course. The histopathology revealed the features of tubulovillous adenoma in all the resected polyps. At 36 months of follow-up, the child is asymptomatic and disease-free.