Introduction
Heart diseases and oncologic diseases are more often found simultaneously worldwide. There is an increasing tendency of both diseases’ incidence due to better diagnostic approaches and increasing aging population. Patients often come to hospital to treat one disease, but during preparation to surgery are found to have another additional. In such cases doctors are always faced with the dilemma of treatment type for a particular patient. There is always a question of the most appropriate treatment plan: What disease to treat first? Is it possible to postpone one type of treatment? Is it possible to perform both surgeries simultaneously? Each case should be discussed in a multidisciplinary team and the treatment plan should be designed for each patient. There are no clear guidelines for situations like this due to huge diversity of possible diagnoses and comorbidities. A lot depends on disease specifics and patient’s condition. There are studies showing that simultaneous treatment can be beneficial to a patient because both surgeries are performed under one total anesthesia, give a chance to cure both diseases at once and eliminate a patient’s anxiety about an ongoing disease. However, simultaneous surgery also put a patient under a great risk of complications and unfortunate outcome due to enormous stress the organism meets having two surgeries at one time. Thus, the question remains open about treatment type and criteria for each type of disease management.
Our case report presents a patient who was hospitalized to be treated from rectal cancer; however, during preparation to surgery she was found to also have a critical stenosis of coronary arteries.