A Reddit post about a man's positive
pregnancy test, which had been left in his bathroom cabinet by an
ex-girlfriend, appears to have alerted him to a testicular tumor.
MAGE: National Cancer Institute
The strange scene was drawn out as a
comic and submitted to the website Reddit, where it drew more than
1,300 comments in three days from concerned strangers.
"You may have testicular cancer! Get to an oncologist, tell them you
took a pregnancy test and it came out positive," one Redditor wrote.
Pregnancy tests detect beta human chorionic gonadotropin, a hormone
in the blood and the urine produced by the developing placenta, a
temporary organ that only forms in female bodies when an embryo has
attached to the uterine lining. Experts say beta hCG can also signal
testicular cancer.
HCG in men can be a sign of a rare (and dangerous) form of
testicular cancer — choriocarcinoma. This is a cancer made up of
syncytiotroblastic cells. The tumor secretes HCG because that's what
syncytiotroblasts do. They secrete HCG. And they don't particularly
care whether they're secreting it into a man or a woman.
Estrogens play important roles in the pathophysiology of breast
tumors and are recognized causal factors in the etiology of breast
cancer (BC); this central insight has led to many of the available
preventive and therapeutic interventions for BC.
Endogenous estrogens may also play causal roles in endometrial and
ovarian cancers and could also be important in male reproductive
cancers, such as male breast cancer, testicular cancer, and prostate
cancer.
Choriocarcinomas move really fast. They're more common in men under
30 and the prognosis is usually bad, because most of the time nobody
catches them until they've already spread to other parts of the
body, especially the lungs.
But men should know that their chances of developing a
choriocarcinoma are extremely rare. A 2002 paper in the Canadian
Journal of Emergency Medicine reported that only about 2 men in
100,000 will get any kind of testicular cancer. Pure
choriocarcinomas — the dangerous kind that I'm talking about here —
make up less than 1% of those diagnoses.
For more information
National Cancer Institute - Hormonal and Reproductive Epidemiology
Research - Other Hormone Related Malignancies
http://dceg.cancer.gov/hreb/research/otherhormone
Testicular Cancer
Testicular Germ Cell Tumors Genetic Admixture Study
http://dceg.cancer.gov/hreb/research/testicular
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/CancerPreventionAndTreatment/pregnancy-test-man-joke-reveals-testicular-cancer/story?id=17653036#.UNQuRVItKnC
http://boingboing.net/2012/11/08/positive-pregnancy-test-diagno.html
(MDN) |