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.