Prolonged lower abdominal pain in a 14-year-old girl was initially mistaken for digestive disorders or abdominal pain during menstruation. Only when the pain became severe did the family take the child to Thanh Nhan Hospital for emergency treatment. Here, doctors discovered a ovarian tumor about 12cm in size that had twisted.
She only complained of abdominal pain in episodes, sometimes painful and sometimes not, so the family thought it was normal abdominal pain. We did not expect a 14-year-old girl to have ovarian disease. When the child was in severe pain, the whole family rushed to take her to the emergency room. When the doctor announced that she had a large ovarian tumor that had twisted and needed immediate surgery, everyone was very confused and worried," the patient's family said.
Immediately after determining the diagnosis, the Obstetrics and Gynecology Department team urgently performed surgery to remove torsion and treat the tumor, and at the same time made efforts to preserve the remaining intact ovarian tissue for the patient.
BSCKII Nguyen Thi Ngoc Bich, Head of Obstetrics Department, Thanh Nhan Hospital, said that the results of post-operative pathogenesis determined that this was an ovarian cyst (adult cyst) - a fairly common benign tumor in girls and young women. What surprised many parents was that inside the tumor may contain hair, skin, fat and sebum; in some rare cases there is also cartilage tissue or teeth.
This is a characteristic of ovarian cysts due to tumors arising from the germ cells of the ovaries - a type of cell that can develop into many different types of tissue in the body. Many parents still believe that ovarian cysts only occur in married women or postpartum women. However, in reality, the disease can appear at any age, including children and girls entering puberty.
What is worrying is that the symptoms at this age are often very discreet. Children may only have dull lower abdominal pain, recurrent pain or feeling of bloating, so they are easily mistaken for digestive disorders, menstrual pain, constipation or other common diseases. Many cases are only detected when the tumor has grown large or ovarian torsion complications occur," BSCKII Nguyen Thi Ngoc Bich emphasized.
According to doctors, for teenage girls, the goal of treatment is not only to remove the tumor but also to try to preserve as many healthy ovaries as possible. This is very important for the endocrine development and fertility of children in the future.
Doctors also recommend that abdominal pain in teenage girls is not always a normal physiological manifestation. When a child has prolonged abdominal pain, recurrent pain, or increasingly severe pain, parents should not treat it at home or wait for the symptoms to stop on their own, but should take the child to a medical facility for examination. Early detection not only helps treatment be simpler and more effective, but also contributes to protecting reproductive health, preserving motherhood and improving the quality of life of children in the future.
