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Q: Dark stool with mucus
asked by: DoctorQuestion on May 18th, 2009
My sister is a 31 year old female. She has had very dark stool along with mucus in it for about a year. She has abdominal pain and has also been feeling very tired and run down.
Her Dr. ran a CBC on her and found that she is severely anemic. She also did a fecal test and found that there is blood in her stool. (She never sees bright red blood though. It is not visible to the eye, just very dark stool)
They did a small bowel follow through, an endoscopy and a colonoscopy and they still have not found anything. Her Dr. said it didn't show Colitis, Crohns, Polyps, or Celiac's disease.
But she is still feeling very tired, constipated, is losing weight, very anemic, has stomach pain, mucus and blood in her stool.
They put her on prenatal vitamins for the anemia.
They are now going to do a capsule endoscopy to check more of her small intestine. If this was cancer, would they have found it by now? What else can she do to test for cancer? Blood tests, etc? What else could it be?


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Dr. Robert Wascher , MD
replied on May 19th, 2009
Stomach Cancer Answer A6615
If the upper and lower endoscopy were performed properly, then the risk of colon, rectal, esophageal or gastric (stomach) cancer should be extremely low. Since these flexible scopes cannot reach the small intestines, however, capsule endoscopy seems appropriate as a next step.

Most of the time, loss of blood in the GI tract of young people is the result of benign conditions, although cancer must always be considered and ruled-out.

I hope that the cause for your sister's symptoms will be identified soon, and that it will turn out not to be a life-threatening illness.

Sincerely,
Robert A. Wascher, MD, FACS


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