A rare gastric polyposis: Cronkhite-Canada syndrome.

A 78-year-old man, without personal or family antecedents, consulted for acquired anorexia and profuse diarrhoea with eight to 10 bowel movements per day for the last 6 weeks, appearing suddenly without an epidemic or medicinal context and not relieved by symptomatic treatments. His general condition was preserved but the patient reported the loss of 6 kg. The clinical examination detected onychomadesis (detachment of the nails) (Fig. 1) and alopecia of the scalp. His abdomen was supple, without palpable mass or hepatosplenomegaly. The laboratory tests detected a hypoalbuminemia at 23 g/L and a macrocytosis at 102 fL. The blood count, the inflammatory (sedimentation rate, reactive protein C, electrophoresis of the plasma proteins and fibrinogen), immune and thyroid assessments were normal. The faecal culture and the parasitology examination of the stools proved to be negative. The gastroscopy found congestive antral gastritis with large very erythematous cerebriform folds, with an infiltrated appearance of the bulb and the duodenum (Fig. 2a and b). The colonoscopy revealed a great many raspberry-like, red nonulcerated and non-hardened sessile polyps along the entire surface of the large intestine associated with a congestive mucosa without lesions suspected of malignancy (Fig. 2c and d).