Why Is Pancreatic Cancer So Deadly?
Woman Diagnosed With 1 In 1,000,000,000 Cancer After Experiencing 'UTI Symptom'
A woman has spoken out about her ultra-rare cancer diagnosis that affects just one in a billion people.
Gianna Cericola is described by her family as a 'workout warrior', a keen fitness fanatic who enjoyed spending time in the gym. But at 27-years-old, she received her devastating diagnosis - desmoplastic small round cell tumor (DSRCT), a rare sarcoma.
Initially, Gianna of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, began experiencing what she believed was a standard urinary tract infection (UTI), as well as stomach pain in early 2024.
Explaining to YouTube channel 'The Patient Story', she said: "The first kind of symptoms that I experienced were kind of like a UTI-related symptom, like a lot of burning when I went to the bathroom and just, like a lot of weird stomach pain in general.
"So then I ended up going to the ER. They didn't see anything, they did an ultrasound. So they sent me home. I would say about six months later, for those six months, I was totally fine, I felt normal, it was, like, really, really weird how the symptoms kind of just went away.
Despite her diagnosis Gianna has been visiting the gym (Instagram/gianna.Cericola)"Six months later, I just randomly started passing out - which never happened. Like, that's not normal for me. So then I went to the ER a few times, and the last time they did an ultrasound they saw an eight centimeter mass in my abdominal cavity."
The now 28-year-old received her diagnosis in October last year, and has been receiving treatment from the Philadelphia cancer facility, Fox Chase Cancer Center, and has set up a GoFundMe to help pay for her medical bills.
Gianna continued: "They told me at first that it looked like a cyst on my ovary and it wasn't cancer, and not to worry about it - but they rushed me into surgery because the tumor started bleeding. So, I was passing out from just internal-bleeding in general.
"I came out of surgery and they told me that it was cancer but they don't know what kind of cancer it was. I waited about... It was like a really long time, I would say like a month for my diagnosis - they weren't really sure. It came back unclassified, and I was super scared."
She went on to explain how being told you have cancer, and doctors not knowing what kind of cancer you have, left her in a state of shock - and to this day she still doesn't know how she is supposed to feel over the diagnosis.
Gianna went on: "It's such a rare kind of cancer, I heard it affects one in one billion people. So I was like, 'I don't know how to feel about this'. It's kind of crazy."
The former graphic designer received an implantable port, which is a tube with a rubber disc on that gets surgically placed underneath the skin of some cancer patients and is used to help administer chemotherapy.
She now hopes to raise awareness of her condition, which she is adamant that it won't limit her from living a fulfilled life.
If you've been affected by any of these issues and want to speak to someone in confidence, contact the American Cancer Society on 1-800-227-2345 or via their live chat feature, available 24/7 every day of the year.
Classification And Diagnostic Prediction Of Cancers Using Gene Expression Profiling And Artificial Neural Networks
Pizzo, P.A. Principles and practice of pediatric oncology. (Lippincott-Raven, Philadelphia, 1997).
Triche, T.J. & Askin, F.B. Neuroblastoma and the differential diagnosis of small-, round-, blue- cell tumors. Hum. Pathol. 14, 569–595 (1983).
Taylor, C. Et al. Diagnosis of Ewing's sarcoma and peripheral neuroectodermal tumour based on the detection of t(11;22) using fluorescence in situ hybridisation. Br. J. Cancer 67, 128–133 (1993).
McManus, A.P., Gusterson, B.A., Pinkerton, C.R. & Shipley, J.M. The molecular pathology of small round-cell tumours—relevance to diagnosis, prognosis, and classification. J. Pathol. 178, 116–121 (1996).
Khan, J. Et al. Gene expression profiling of alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma with cDNA microarrays. Cancer Res. 58, 5009–5013 (1998).
Alizadeh, A.A. Et al. Distinct types of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma identified by gene expression profiling. Nature 403, 503–511 (2000).
Bittner, M. Et al. Molecular classification of cutaneous malignant melanoma by gene expression profiling. Nature 406, 536–540 (2000).
Golub, T.R. Et al. Molecular classification of cancer: class discovery and class prediction by gene expression monitoring. Science 286, 531–537 (1999).
Bishop, C.M. Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition. (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995).
Heden, B., Ohlin, H., Rittner, R. & Edenbrandt, L. Acute myocardial infarction detected in the 12-lead ECG by artificial neural networks. Circulation 96, 1798–1802 (1997).
Silipo, R., Gori, M., Taddei, A., Varanini, M. & Marchesi, C. Classification of arrhythmic events in ambulatory electrocardiogram, using artificial neural networks. Comput. Biomed. Res. 28, 305–318 (1995).
Ashizawa, K. Et al. Artificial neural networks in chest radiography: application to the differential diagnosis of interstitial lung disease. Acad. Radiol. 6, 2–9 (1999).
Abdolmaleki, P. Et al. Neural network analysis of breast cancer from MRI findings. Radiat. Med. 15, 283–293 (1997).
Eisen, M.B., Spellman, P.T., Brown, P.O. & Botstein, D. Cluster analysis and display of genome-wide expression patterns. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 95, 14863–14868 (1998).
deLapeyriere, O. Et al. Expression of the Fgf6 gene is restricted to developing skeletal muscle in the mouse embryo. Development 118, 601–611 (1993).
Jaakkola, S. Et al. Amplification of fgfr4 gene in human breast and gynecological cancers. Int. J. Cancer. 54, 378–382 (1993).
Shaoul, E., Reich-Slotky, R., Berman, B. & Ron, D. Fibroblast growth factor receptors display both common and distinct signaling pathways. Oncogene 10, 1553–1561 (1995).
Kovar, H. Et al. Overexpression of the pseudoautosomal gene MIC2 in Ewing's sarcoma and peripheral primitive neuroectodermal tumor. Oncogene 5, 1067–1070 (1990).
Kumar, S., Perlman, E., Harris, C.A., Raffeld, M. & Tsokos, M. Myogenin is a specific marker for rhabdomyosarcoma: an immunohistochemical study in paraffin-embedded tissues. Mod. Pathol. 13, 988–993 (2000).
DeRisi, J. Et al. Use of a cDNA microarray to analyse gene expression patterns in human cancer. Nature Genet. 14, 457–460 (1996).
Perou, C.M. Et al. Molecular portraits of human breast tumours. Nature 406, 747–752 (2000).
Hedenfalk, I. Et al. Gene-expression profiles in hereditary breast cancer. N. Engl. J. Med. 344, 539–548 (2001).
Brown, M.P. Et al. Knowledge-based analysis of microarray gene expression data by using support vector machines. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 97, 262–267 (2000).
Furey, T.S. Et al. Support vector machine classification and validation of cancer tissue samples using microarray expression data. Bioinformatics 16, 906–914. (2000).
Mu, J. & Roach, P.J. Characterization of human glycogenin-2, a self-glucosylating initiator of liver glycogen metabolism. J. Biol. Chem. 273, 34850–34856 (1998).
Lee, M.G., Loomis, C. & Cowan, N.J. Sequence of an expressed human beta-tubulin gene containing ten Alu family members. Nucleic Acids Res. 12, 5823–5836 (1984).
Savchenko, V.L., McKanna, J.A., Nikonenko, I.R. & Skibo, G.G. Microglia and astrocytes in the adult rat brain: comparative immunocytochemical analysis demonstrates the efficacy of lipocortin 1 immunoreactivity. Neuroscience 96, 195–203 (2000).
Nagano, T. Et al. Differentially expressed olfactomedin-related glycoproteins (Pancortins) in the brain. Brain Res. Mol. Brain Res. 53, 13–23 (1998).
Takahashi, Y., Campbell, E.A., Hirata, Y., Takayama, T. & Listowsky, I. A basis for differentiating among the multiple human Mu-glutathione S- transferases and molecular cloning of brain GSTM5. J. Biol. Chem. 268, 8893–8898 (1993).
Cavazzana, A.O., Miser, J.S., Jefferson, J. & Triche, T.J. Experimental evidence for a neural origin of Ewing's sarcoma of bone. Am. J. Pathol. 127, 507–518 (1987).
McKarney, L.A., Overall, M.L. & Dziadek, M. Myogenesis in cultures of uniparental mouse embryonic stem cells: differing patterns of expression of myogenic regulatory factors. Int. J. Dev. Biol. 41, 485–490 (1997).
Strohman, R.C., Micou-Eastwood, J., Glass, C.A. & Matsuda, R. Human fetal muscle and cultured myotubes derived from it contain a fetal-specific myosin light chain. Science 221, 955–957 (1983).
Song, W.K., Wang, W., Foster, R.F., Bielser, D.A. & Kaufman, S.J. H36-alpha 7 is a novel integrin alpha chain that is developmentally regulated during skeletal myogenesis. J. Cell. Biol. 117, 643–657 (1992).
Green, B.N. Et al. Distinct expression patterns of insulin-like growth factor binding proteins 2 and 5 during fetal and postnatal development. Endocrinology 134, 954–962 (1994).
El-Badry, O.M. Et al. Insulin-like growth factor II acts as an autocrine growth and motility factor in human rhabdomyosarcoma tumors. Cell Growth Differ. 1, 325–331 (1990).
Khan, J. Et al. CDNA microarrays detect activation of a myogenic transcription program by the PAX3-FKHR fusion oncogene. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 96, 13264–13269 (1999).
Holtrich, U., Brauninger, A., Strebhardt, K. & Rubsamen-Waigmann, H. Two additional protein-tyrosine kinases expressed in human lung: fourth member of the fibroblast growth factor receptor family and an intracellular protein-tyrosine kinase. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 88, 10411–10415 (1991).
Hughes, S.E. Differential expression of the fibroblast growth factor receptor (FGFR) multigene family in normal human adult tissues. J. Histochem. Cytochem. 45, 1005–1019 (1997).
Chen, Y., Dougherty, E.R. & Bittner, M.L. Ratio-based decisions and the quantitative analysis of cDNA microarray images. Biomedical Optics 2, 364–374 (1997).
Jollife, I.T. Principal Component Analysis. (Springer, New York, 1986).
Comments
Post a Comment