Localized Fat Atrophy after Jelly-fish Sting

Abstract

The feature of interest in this case is the relation of the long-standing psychological disturbance to the development of oesophageal cancer.Lawrence Abel (1929) states that two-thirds of his cases of carcinoma of the oesophagus were preceded by an incident of emotional stress, and Guigez (1925) has said that half of the cases in his series had a similar history.Abel suggests that the neoplasm arises at the site of pre-existing spasm of the muscle wall, and refers to his own observations and those of Guisez that mental stress is often a cause of oesophageal spasm.If the patient's symptoms before the development of car- cinoma had been due to oesophageal spasm, it is reasonable to suppose that during the twenty-years history some of the oesophageal dilatation and hypertrophy characteristically the result of spasm ought to have developed.This was not so, and one is forced to the conclusion that in this patient, at any rate, whatever aetiological relation there may have been between mental stress and oesophageal cancer, spasm played no part.