Endoscopic hemostasis of a bleeding gastric gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) with endoloop placement

INTRODUCTION

Gastrointestinal bleeding due to gastric neoplasia is difficult to manage and may provoke dramatic situations. For the most part, therapeutic endoscopic methods provide only temporary success in controlling bleeding. Often, a poor clinical condition and an advanced stage of the neoplastic disease mean these patients will receive exclusively palliative clinical care. Hence, surgical procedures are often contraindicated, either due to lack of clinical conditions or the increased mortality resulting from surgical trauma. In such cases, alternative endoscopic techniques have been described as minimally invasive means of controlling tumor-induced bleeding.

CASE REPORT

A 79 year-old man with gastric GIST, receiving Imatinib for the presence of multiple hepatic (Figure 1), pulmonary and bone metastases, was admitted to the Cancer Institute of the University of São Paulo Medical School,São Paulo, SP, Brazil after presenting massive hematemesis, followed by syncope.